Add a Little Color to Windows Live Mail

As much as I’m into customizing my UIs, I’m relatively surprised that I completely overlooked this feature in Windows Live Mail: color! Thankfully, the Live Mail Team updated their blog the other day and pointed it out to me. Of course, I immediately opened my inbox and started tweaking away.

What I hadn’t noticed before is that in the latest build of Windows Live Mail, there’s a toolbar button that has a picture of a paint brush on it up at the top of the window. Click on that and you can change the color of the window frame in Live Mail. (Looking up, I see it’s here in Live Writer, too. Guess who’s blogging in pink now?)

However, the color feature in Live Mail isn’t just for fun – it can be useful too. If you have multiple email accounts coming into your inbox, you can set each account as a different color to help you better identify which messages are which. To do so, right-click on an email account in the left-side column and choose “Set Color” from the menu that appears. After changing colors there, you’ll then notice that the email headers will now reflect which account they are associated with:

That’s actually pretty handy. The Live Mail Team notes that color customizations can also be found in Windows Live Calendar, too, where each calendar can be changed to be a different color as well.