How to Change the Colour of Messages Across Different Platforms

Colour-coding messages isn't just cosmetic. It can signal priority, separate conversations, improve readability, and help you manage high-volume inboxes or group chats more effectively. But the exact steps — and what's even possible — vary widely depending on which platform or app you're using. Here's a clear breakdown of how message colour changes work across the most common environments.

Why Message Colour Settings Exist

Most messaging and email platforms offer some form of colour customisation for a practical reason: visual differentiation. When you're managing dozens of threads or scanning a busy inbox, colour acts as a fast signal. It can indicate who sent a message, how urgent it is, whether it's been flagged, or simply make the interface easier on your eyes.

The options available to you depend on whether the platform treats colour as a display theme, a label or tag attribute, a per-sender rule, or a chat bubble setting. These are meaningfully different mechanisms.

Changing Message Colours in Email Clients

Gmail

Gmail doesn't let you change the colour of individual message text directly, but it does support label colours, which visually differentiate messages in your inbox. To change a label's colour:

1. Go to Settings → Labels
2. Find the label you want to colour
3. Click the coloured dot or square next to it and choose a new colour

Labels apply to entire threads, and the colour appears as a tag in your message list. You can also use stars (in various colours) to flag individual messages — these are configurable under Settings → General → Stars.

Microsoft Outlook

Outlook has one of the more flexible colour systems among email clients. Conditional Formatting (sometimes called Automatic Formatting in older versions) lets you assign colours to messages based on rules — such as sender, subject keywords, or whether you're the only recipient.

To set this up in the desktop client:

• Go to View → View Settings → Conditional Formatting
• Add a new rule, set your conditions, then choose a font colour

This affects how the message appears in your message list — the sender name and subject line will display in your chosen colour. It's particularly useful for prioritising messages from specific people or projects. 🎨

Categories in Outlook also carry colour. Assigning a category to a message colour-codes it in your folder view, and you can customise which colour represents each category.

Apple Mail

Apple Mail supports colour-coded flags — you can right-click a message and assign one of several flag colours (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple). These appear in the message list as coloured dots. More granular colour control (like per-sender font colouring) is limited compared to Outlook.

Changing Message Colours in Chat Apps

iMessage (iPhone and iPad)

On Apple devices, iMessage bubble colour reflects the message type, not a user setting:

• Blue bubbles = iMessage (sent over Apple's servers)
• Green bubbles = SMS/MMS (sent via your carrier)

You can't manually change bubble colours in iMessage. However, iOS does allow you to change the overall display theme (light/dark mode), which affects the general colour palette of the interface.

Android Messages (Google Messages)

Google Messages supports themes, which change the colour of chat bubbles and the app's interface overall. Go to:

• Settings → Display → Theme or Chat colours

Some Android devices and launchers offer additional customisation, and third-party SMS apps (such as Textra or QKSMS) give significantly more control over bubble colours — including per-contact colour assignment.

WhatsApp

WhatsApp's colour customisation is limited to wallpaper changes for individual chats. Message bubbles follow the app's theme (light or dark). There's no native option to set individual bubble colours per contact, though this is a commonly requested feature.

Discord

Discord uses role colours to differentiate users in servers. If you have permission to assign roles, you can set a colour for each role, and members' names will display in that colour in chat. Individual message text colour isn't separately configurable for standard users.

Changing Text Colour Within Messages

This is a different question: not colouring the container of a message, but the text itself.

In email clients, composing in rich text (HTML) mode typically gives you a font colour picker in the toolbar. Switching to plain text mode removes this option entirely.

In chat apps, colour in message text is rare. Discord allows some colour effects using code block formatting with specific syntax, but it's not a straightforward colour picker — it requires knowledge of the markdown-style input.

The Variables That Determine What's Possible 🖥️

What you can actually change depends on several factors:

• Platform: Each app has its own design philosophy around colour. Email clients tend to offer more customisation than consumer chat apps.
• Client type: Web versions of apps often have fewer customisation options than native desktop or mobile apps.
• Operating system: Android generally allows more third-party SMS app flexibility than iOS.
• Account type: Some Outlook colour features behave differently between Microsoft 365 accounts and personal Outlook.com accounts.
• Permissions: In platforms like Discord or Slack, colour customisation may be tied to admin or role permissions.

Different Users, Different Situations

A solo user managing a personal inbox has very different needs from someone handling a shared team inbox with hundreds of threads daily. A power Outlook user running conditional formatting rules operates in a completely different environment than someone on a basic web Gmail account who just wants to highlight a few flagged messages.

Similarly, someone primarily communicating via chat apps will find the colour options more constrained by design — these platforms prioritise simplicity and cross-platform consistency over deep customisation. Third-party apps can bridge that gap on Android, but iOS users have fewer workarounds available.

Your ability to implement meaningful colour changes depends on the specific combination of platform, client, account type, and — in some cases — whether you're an admin or standard user. What works straightforwardly in one setup may require a workaround or simply not be possible in another. ✅