Outlook For Mac Conditional Formatting

Posted on 17-08-2021 by admin

Outlook 2016 has seven predefined conditional formatting rules, like:

Using On-Prem Exchange 2016 and all users have Outlook 2016/2019. I want to setup a global Exchange rule that basically would highlight any email address in red in Outlook if not from my domain. Havn't seen anything on the server end that can do this only creating Outlook formatting rules which is done on each person's computer individually.
From Outlook follow these steps: Click on the View tab. Then click View Settings. In the Advanced View Settings dialog box, click Conditional Formatting. In the Conditional Formatting dialog add a new rule by clicking Add. A new rule will be created with default name of Untitled. Enter the desired name for the rule and click Font.

Show unread emails in blue and bold font;
Show expired emails in gray and strikethrough font;
Show overdue emails in red font.

You can customize existing and create additional conditional formatting rules. For example:

Outlook for Microsoft 365 Outlook 2019 Outlook 2016 Outlook 2013 More. Less If you'd like to give your calendar a brighter, more visually dynamic look, you can use conditional formatting to color-code your appointments and meetings based on sender, location, or whether the appointment is set as Free, Busy, or Out of Office.

Make messages received from a specific person red
Make messages sent to some address italic
Add conditional formatting rule to highlight messages from particular people addresseddirectly to you.

To create additional or configure existing conditional formatting rules, do the following:

1. On the View tab, in the Current View group, clickView Settings:

2. In the Advanced View Settings dialog box, click ConditionalFormatting...:

In the Conditional Formatting dialog box, you can see a set of default rules (also, anyconditional formatting rules that you created in the Organize pane in a previous version ofOutlook):

3. Do one of the following:

To temporarily turn off a conditional formatting rule, clear the checkbox for that rule.
To change the text formatting that applies to the rule, click on the rule name, and then click theFont... button to open the Font dialog box:
To add a new conditional formatting rule, click Add to create a new rule namedUntitled and then:
- In the Name box, type a name of the new rule
- Click Font... to specify the font characteristics that Outlook 2016 applies to themessage fields if the rule’s conditions are met
- Click Condition... to specify the criteria for this rule:
To change the criteria for a rule, select the rule, and then click Condition... (this buttonis enabled only for user's rules, not for five predefined conditional formatting rules)
To delete a rule, click on the rule, and then click Delete (this button is enabled only foruser's rules, not for the predefined conditional formatting rules).

Notes:

The Move Up and Move Down buttons change the order of the conditional formatting rules. Outlookrules listed higher have the precedence. Lower rules extend the formatting but now overwrite it. Forexample, if the higher rule sets the font and the color, the lower rule cannot change them, but itcan make the font bold.
The conditional formatting applies to the folders that share a view. Different views have differentconditional formatting rules.

See also this tip in French:Mise en forme conditionnelle.

When you receive a large volume of mails, it can often become cumbersome to process through each one and to distinguish when a mail was sent internally vs externally from a user with a similar name. On it’s own, replying to someone externally with a message you assumed was going internally can lead to embarrassing situations but more worrying, attackers often rely on this to tailor phishing mails to try to catch the user unaware.

Using a Disclaimer

There are already various solutions to try and mitigate this problem, such as defining a transport rule to prepend a warning on all external mails. This solution is pretty good as we can format the warning to make it catch the users eye.

I’ve seen push back on this in the past as it does hinder the message preview in places like the Outlook Mobile App which can annoy users. We could also append the disclaimer but this can be easily missed.

Prepend to the Subject

Using the same method as above, we can also update our rule to prepend the subject however this can also give users a bad experience.

When using this method it’s important to ensure it is not applied multiple times to the same mail chain or we can end up a long string of our chosen term at the start of the subject.

Microsoft Outlook For Mac Conditional Formatting

Use Conditional Formatting in Outlook

Another method is to use Outlooks Conditional Formatting feature to identify particular mails and apply formatting such as a colour to them. This can be done from the “View” tab in Outlook, under “View Settings” and “Conditional Formatting”. Here we can add a rule to identify mails from our internal Domains and apply particulatr colour and formatting.

This will then colour internal and external mails differently allowing us to easily distinguish between them.

Tag External Emails

This one is a relatively new feature, Exchange Online now offers the ability to automatically tag external emails in Outlook on the Web, Outlook for Mac and Outlook for iOS/Android, according to the documentation, certain versions of Outlook for Windows will see this as a mail tip also however I haven’t been able to test this yet. To turn this feature on, connect to the Exchange Online Management Shell and run the command: