How to Highlight Your Emails to Make Messages Stand Out

Most email programs that download email to your computer have rules that you can set which help you to organize your messages to make them easier to read.

You can for example set rules to segregate messages related to Facebook, Squidoo, Family, Friends, Banking, Shopping etc, rather than have all your messages left in a single Inbox.

Webmail is often more limited in the options that you have to organize your messages, but I would like to offer some suggestions here that might help.

For reading my Webmail I use Squirrel Mail, which is one of the programs that my hosting company use, but it is also used by a lot of other organizations and Internet Service Providers.

There is an option in Squirrel Mail to Highlight Messages, and I use this with my email received from Associated Content to help different types of messages to stand out from the rest.

To set this up in Squirrel Mail (and it should be similar in other Webmail programs):

• Click on Options
• Click on Message Highlighting
• Click on New.
• Give your Rule a name
• Define how to recognize this group of messages
• Select a color for them
• Click Submit

It is literally as easy as that.

Using This Idea With Associated Content

I have three sets of message highlighting rules defined:

• AC Comments
• Published Articles
• Messages from Authors

Each group of messages now stands out in my Webmail Inbox.

This allows me to easily identify any messages that people have sent me, and I usually read these first, reply to them, and then delete them.

Secondly, I usually read any comments that people have left on my articles, and these again have been given their own unique color. I read these and if desired open the article and add my own comment, then delete them.

Finally, I am left with the notifications of new articles that have been published by people that I follow, which are all highlighted.

All other emails that are not related to Associated Content I leave un-highlighted, so that these again stand out clearly.

Using this technique has really helped me to process my emails related to Associated Content a lot faster, since I no longer have to browse for different types of messages, and if you can respond to direct messages fast, and then comments, it not only looks better, it helps to reduce the number of emails that you have that are waiting to be processed.

I hope you find this idea useful, and you can use it with any category of email to make identification easier.

The same concept will work with any email program, provided there is an option to highlight messages.

There should be two images associated with this article. If you click on them, you should be able to see the setting up of these options and also how the highlighted messages appear in your Inbox.