Customize label/tag colors

mail.google.com itself allows you to specify colors for different labels/tags.

gmail-labels

After years of using the same colors, it’s a little odd to see the same emails with different colors in Mailspring.

mailspring-labels

How are you generating these folder/label colors? Is there any way to pull the colors directly from Gmail? I understand if this information simply is not available, but I’m interested to understand the current process either way.


(Originally posted by curtisgibby on GitHub.)

Hey—thanks for filing this! Right now, the colors are pseudo-randomly generated here: https://github.com/Foundry376/Mailspring/blob/3a526d2fa7e32b204ae1d09bd6e013dc684087bf/app/src/flux/models/category.es6#L127 Right now Mailspring uses the Gmail IMAP interface, which doesn’t expose the colors selected in Gmail, but there might be a way we could do this with the Gmail first-party API?


(Originally posted by bengotow on GitHub.)

Hey there,

would be a really helpful enhancement seeing same labelcolors in Mailspring. We also use the same colorcode for a while now and every teammember is used to them. Seeing different colors in Mailspring is really a little weird.

Cant wait to see this enhancement soon.


(Originally posted by DanKrue80 on GitHub.)

1 Like

Hey there,

If it’s not possible to pull the colors from gmail, why not make a Settings option where you can choose a color? This way, you can at least match it on your own.
But this is probably another thing, so should I open a new issue for this?


(Originally posted by evoxxgithub on GitHub.)

(Original post had 12 upvotes.)

I agree with @evoxxgithub , why not add a simple color picker?


(Originally posted by ipolevoy on GitHub.)

Following up on @evoxxgithub and @ipolevoy… Two years later this seems like a huge benefit for a mail client that does care about aesthetics. For some of us, colour is a key part of organization. Is the not-yet-possible tag added because the feature was not added or because it is not yet possible to add a color-picker feature?


(Originally posted by bradleyreid on GitHub.)

This for me is a killer feature and the reason why I can’t swich from thunderbird… :frowning:


(Originally posted by gatiba on GitHub.)

Being able to add colors to labels is a fundamentally feature for mail organization. I just started using Mailspring and not being able to change the colors of labels is a big problem. My whole workflow is being thrown off. Please consider a feature to change the color of labels!!


(Originally posted by moatus on GitHub.)

I think we could reasonably accept a pull request, or at least a plugin, for a color picker feature, depending on how it was implemented into the interface. (Actually, you’d build it the same anyway whether as a built-in core plugin or an external plugin.) We don’t want to clog the interface up with too many options, but this seems like a fairly elementary use case.

Being a linux user, I’m very much used to having complete control of even the most minute settings to make my life more efficient by using automation (which is the entire purpose of computers).

The Problem

It is really hard to identify which category each mail belongs to; all of the chosen label colours look almost identical. Additionally being a gmail user and having granular control of the colour we use for each label, has gotten me used to a specific colour for each label.

Proposed Solution

Allow us to choose the colour of each label manually so that we can match the colours we have in the gmail interface.

Alternative Solutions

Sync the label colour to gmail automatically.

Context

I used to believe that Mailbird was the best client to use with gmail, BUT Mailbird is not available for linux, which was a bummer. But then looking for an alternative to Mailbird for linux, I came across a few clients that could work with gmail labels and found that Mailspring came the closest to mimicking gmail’s labels as a linux email client and actually I now think that Mailspring is BETTER than Mailbird for gmail, however it is still lacking this core feature of label colour customization.

I believe this affects ORGANIZATION and PRODUCTIVITY greatly therefore, I kindly urge the developers to prioritize this solution.

Thank you.