[InactionMan]

So I set a rule to mark certain messages with a colour except now I no longer want those messages marked. I cannot seem to find how to turn this off or reverse the effect. Google turned up no love, nor did Apple's discussion forum. Damn.

How might I go about fixing this?

[Kickaha]

You mean *other* than opening Mail's Preferences, clicking on the Rules pane, selecting the rule you want to remove and clicking the Remove button?

No idea.

[InactionMan]

Originally Posted by Kickaha You mean *other* than opening Mail's Preferences, clicking on the Rules pane, selecting the rule you want to remove and clicking the Remove button? No idea.

Yeah, other than that. That did nothing.

[Kickaha]

You got me then. That's the only UI to do so. :/

Or do you mean that you want *previously* marked messages to no longer be marked? Because rules only apply to new incoming messages... if you're looking to group select the previously marked messages, then unmark them, try:

View menu -> Sort By -> Color.

Quickly select the messages you want to change.

....and then find no way to remove the color. Odd. Okay, try this...

Set up a rule to trigger on 'any message', and for action have it change the color to be 'normal'. This will require you to customize the colors to white and black for the background and foreground. Now select the messages as above, then select from the Message menu -> Apply Rules. (If you don't select the messages, it will apply to *ALL* messages in your mailbox, which you probably don't want.)

That should do it. How odd.

[InactionMan]

Bugger. There can't not be a reasonable way to do this.

Okay, I think I kind of did what you suggested. Set the colour in the rule to white and applied it to coloures messages. Except the problem is that messages coloured with a rule supersedes the colour applied to threaded messages so any thread with a previously marked message does not get the highlight for threaded messages, only the little arrow beside it.

Crud.

I tried deleting the preference thingy and starting from scratch but that didn't work so I threw the backup of the .plist back in the preferences folder to get things back to semi-normal.

This is dumb.

[Kickaha]

Wow, you got me on this one. I've poked through the ~/Library/Mail folder, and they only thing I can think of is that the label info is stored in the CachedData1 file, which is a big assed binary descriptor file for the entire folder. Yes, each folder.

Ew.