Color coding messages in Mail (Yosemite) does not work.

Hi,

A little late but I had this same problem too, on Yosemite, and came across this thread. I finally found out if I uncheck the "organize by conversation" under view menu, the color coding now work!

Hope it works for you.

I have the same problem. I can't colour the background of a new message. I don't have a solution but I do have a workaround:

The only way I could get this to work was to take an old message and reply to it. I deleted the existing content and subject line and then started fresh. The only problem with this is that it will be part of the thread that you "responded" to but this is not a problem for me since I don't organize messages by conversation.

hey guys, so I was trying to apply the colours manually today and it works, but for some reason, I could only see the applied colour once I restarted mail. This seems to be some bug, so I hope apple will fix this, as it is more user friendly and it hits you right into the eye any time you start your mail. Flags are too tiny and very limited.

mrJeyK - How are you applying the color? I've tried double-clicking (what worked in 10.8) and dragging the small rectangle of color and the large/chosen rectangle onto the message and the color never appears. Do you close mail immediately after color-coding and then restart mail to get the colors to appear? Nothing I've tried has worked.

Why do they always have to break at least one thing that people really like when they bring out a new version? I haven't moved to El Capitan yet because I don't have the strength yet to try to find all the "work-arounds" for the things I assume they screwed up with it...

I know I could use a different mail software but I like Mail; I'm used to it. And, this is the only thing that I don't like in mail. (Of course I have to use a plug-in to get the file system to work correctly and to include tabs. Sigh.)

Anyway, thanks for any help. I REALLY wish Apple would fix this problem.

hey Angle,

from what I gather, there is actually no need to drag-and-drop the colour. You just select the e-mail in question and click the colour (I've ended up using the colour palettes - namely crayons for higher colour selection). The problem is that the e-mails are not colour marked immediately. I have to switch between inboxes (I have 3) and when I go back to the inbox that I was changing the colour in, the colour is applied. Otherwise I had to quit and restart mail for this change to apply. It is annoying, but hey - it works, so until there is a fix, this is a workaround. Hope that helps! Btw, I'm on El Capitan v10.11.6

My Mail filing system is based on 1) inbox (where I only keep things that require my attention) and 2) folders (to file a way the mails that I have already resolved).

What kind of plugin are you using? Might be worth trying for me.

Please try this method : open system preferences & click on general .

Choose highlight color & click on drop down arrow and change the color as per your choice .

mrJeyK - thank you for responding. When I try to apply the color, then switch to another mailbox/inbox (of a different e-mail address), the color is not applied. (I have Yosemite installed on both a MacAir and a MacBook and it won't work on either.)

I don't have any plug-in's for Mail. That is exactly what I'm looking for - do you know of any that will return the manual color-code option? I'm surprised that no plug-in/app/extension was built to solve this problem since - based on the number of Google search returns I received - many people seemed unhappy about the removal and unhappy with the non-working solution provided by Apple support.

tygb - Thank you for responding. I tried changing the system preferences as you suggested. Unfortunately, that only changed the highlight color of the selected message (changed back to white background when I selected a different message); it didn't color-code the message. Thanks for trying to help though.

i was away for few days , apologize for it couldn't answer but found a good article color code messages : Mail (El Capitan): Color-code messages

Hi tygb, rules are fine when you want to apply same colour to the same people, but I prefer marking messages based on how important they are in the mailbox myself... Good article though 🙂

that is weird. Might be a Yosemite thing. Since this works for me, I do not need any plugins and such.. sorry about your issues. As I wrote, when I apply the colour and either quit and re-start Mail, or simply switch between inboxes, this is what my inbox looks like - (screenshot attached).

MrJeyK - Well... I am just jealous. Are you using El Capitan, then?

I haven't "upgraded" because I always wait a long time to upgrade OS X (and even longer for Windows!) so most of the bugs are gone when I finally install the upgrade. Also because I rarely find anything "improved" with a new release and almost always some feature is removed that I really liked. But, I hate not having color-coded emails so maybe it is time to bite the bullet (if it works in El Capitan).

(Thanks for taking the time to post the photo.)

yes, I'm on El Capitan 10.11.6

The mail colours feature is not 100% bug free, but it works for me. It is a nice advanced colour sorting above the basic 7 flags. Good luck with El Capitan if you do go along with it 🙂

I wasted too much time trying to use "Rules" in Mail Preferences. rossedunn's way actually worked for me.