Outlook 2013 - Follow Up Flags and Color Blindness

I have a mild case of red/green color blindness. As reds and greens get close to gray, I can't tell the difference as easily as most other people. After moving to Outlook 2013, the Flag column now has a medium gray flag next to all un-flagged emails. When I do stuff that turns them red and other color variations not far from red-pink-whatever, I simply cannot spot the difference at a glance. I have to lean in to the monitor or even zoom in.

Is there some way to adjust these colors or return Outlook to have nothing there for an un-flagged message?

Thanks - Jeremy 

September 25th, 2013 2:36pm

Hi,

As far as i know, there is no method to make it nothing there for un-flagged messages or adjust the colors.

As a workaround, you may use categories to mark messages with different colors.

Regards.

Melon Chen
TechNet Community Support

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September 27th, 2013 3:25am

Hi,

As far as i know, there is no method to make it nothing there for un-flagged messages or adjust the colors.

As a workaround, you may use categories to mark messages with different colors.

Regards.

Melon Chen
TechNet Community Support

September 27th, 2013 3:25am

Is there any way to put in a feature request for this?  Or to change the gray flag color?  I'm in the exact same situation and this is quite frustrating--a really useful feature has now become very difficult to use.
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March 3rd, 2014 6:00pm

100% agree! Just upgraded to Outlook 2013 and this is driving me nuts. Glad I'm not the only one. FWIW, also mildly red-green deficient and the red flags fade into the background visually for me when lined up in a row of gray flags.
October 22nd, 2014 1:47am

I have exactly the same problem and am getting very frustrated. Did you find a solution. In older versions, the colours were far more vibrant and easier to identify.
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March 3rd, 2015 5:40am

Having the same problem, good to see microsoft don't care about the 8% of men and 0.5% of women who suffer from colourblindness.

I use categories to separate the mails already and so can't use them to replace the flags.

March 9th, 2015 12:34pm

I just ran across this thread and I know this is a bit old, but I thought I'd suggest a workaround (though not a solution).

The gray flags that show by default only show if the reading pane is sized so that the messages in the current view or folder are wide enough. For example, here the gray flags are appearing next to all unflagged messages, and I've flagged two with the red flag, and I understand for some folks these are hard to distinguish:

But if I resize my reading pane, the gray flags no longer appear, only the red flags:

Just thought that might help!

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March 11th, 2015 4:09pm

I found a work around today - it doesn't fix the flag icons, but allows you to see which messages have a flag.

Select view, then view settings.  Now click on 'conditional formatting'. Click 'Add', and change the font to (say) italic and a colour that you can actually see. Now click 'Condition', then click 'More Choices' then click the check box that says 'Only Item Which' and then ensure 'are flagged by me' is selected in the drop down.

What this will do is change the formatting of each row so you can quickly see which messages are flagged.

I agree that this change in design is terrible, and I don't even love this workaround, but it does work!  

You may need to do this more than once (depending on the folder/view).

Hope this helps.

July 24th, 2015 5:29pm

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