Create a rule in Mail to automatically assign background colors to incoming messages.

I just switched from Entourage to Mail, and I can’t figure out how to use colors to highlight the email messages that I receive, as I could in Entourage by selecting a category (e.g., friends are purple, family is green, and so on).

To manually apply a background color to an email, click the message in your viewer window, choose Format > Show Colors to bring up the color picker, and select the one that you want. If you find yourself using the same colors repeatedly, you can “bookmark” a color in the color picker by dragging the large rectangle that represents your color onto one of the small boxes that appears below. Unlike in Entourage, your background colors only appear within the ist of messages, and not in the actual window of the message itself.

To automatically apply a background color to incoming emails, you can set up a rule in Mail to color email messages if they’re from a certain person or Address Book group. Let’s say that you’ve already created a group in your Address Book called Family and dragged all of your family contacts into that group. Now you want any incoming messages from those contacts to be highlighted green. Select Mail > Preferences, click the Rules button, and choose Add Rule. Give the rule a description, select the condition “Sender is member of Group,” and then choose the group Family. Underneath “Perform the following actions,” choose “Set Color” and “of background” from the drop-downs,  and select the color you’d like.