Postbox Custom Topic Color

Postbox is an e-mail client that contains all sorts of methods to organize and view your e-mails. One of the features is assigning messages a Topic, or what most people would call labels or tags. A single message can be assigned to a Topic or multiple topics. You then can view all messages for a specific topic. But the unique feature about Topics is that you can assign a color to the Topic which makes it easy to view messages assigned to a specific topic in the message list. Sadly there is a limited amount of colors you can pick… or is there. Continue reading below to learn how to set custom colors to Labels in Postbox.

Changing Topic Color

To change a topic color to something unique, you need to first find the Hex Color Code of a color you want to use. If you are unsure what a Hex Color Code is, it’s a 6 character string that identifies RGB values in hexadecimal. For example FF0000 is 255 0 0 which is Red. Luckily though, you can just search for a Hex Color Wheel online and pick the color you want and get the Hex Color Code value in return. After you have your code follow the steps below.

1. Open Postbox “Tools” from the main menu and click on “Options”
2. Inside Options go to “Advanced” and then the tab of “General”
3. At the bottom of the “General” tab you should see “Config Editor” which you need to open. A warning will appear talking about how modifying values could cause problems. Just remember to be careful.
4. In the Filter bar of the Config Editor search for mailnews.tags which will show all the values for Topics you have created.
5. Find the tag you want to edit by looking at the “Value” column. Follow this row back to the “Preference Name” column and remember the value that is after mailnews.tags. and before .tag. For example, if the Preference Name is mailnews.tags.resolved.tag you want to remember the value resolved.
6. In the Filter search bar, search for mailnews.tags.TOPIC.color where TOPIC is the value from the previous step, such as resolved. You could also just look at the existing results for the filter mailnews.tags and manually look for the color row.
7. If you found the row for the color, double click on the Value of the row and a dialog will appear asking you for a string value. Enter your Hex Color Code and make sure there is a # before the code. After this click on Ok for the dialog and close the Config Editor windows.
8. If you didn’t find a color row, right click on the Config Editor and select “New String”. In the dialog window enter the Preference Name which will be mailnews.tags.TOPIC.color where the TOPIC value is the previous value you had to remember, such as “resolved.” Next the dialog will change asking for a value. Enter the Hex Color Code while making sure it starts with a # symbol. Then click on Ok to save your changes.

Removing Topic Color

To properly remove a topic color instead of just changing the color to be black, follow the steps below.

1. Open Postbox “Tools” from the main menu and then click on “Options.”
2. Inside of “Options” open the “Advanced” page and then go to the “General” tab. where you will then open the “Config Editor”
3. Search for the value of mailnews.tags to return all of the various Topics you have created.
4. Find the Topic you want to delete by looking at the “Value” column. Once you find your value trace this row back to the “Preference Name” column and remember the value after mailnews.tags. For instance, if your “Preference Name” is mailnews.tags.resolved.tag remember the value resolved.
5. Now find the Preference Name of mailnews.tags.TOPIC.color where TOPIC is the previous value we just found, in our example it’s “resolved”.
6. Right click on the row and select “Reset” which will remove the Topics Color.