Changing Apple Mail from color codes to flags

Apple Mail before Lion allowed you to sort by Color - thus SpamSieve’s color coding of “best guess” importance was wonderful. With Lion you can no long sort by Color, but Apple has added sort by Flags. Is there a way to change the way SpamSieve is set up so that it will ADD a flag of the same color. I still like the idea of the Colors, but would also like to be able to do a sort. Or if another way could be added to do a sort than that would work also. Thanks. Rick

I think you could do that by setting up color-specific rules as described on the Spam Message Colors in Apple Mail page.

One unfortunate side effect of using flags is that the spam messages would appear in the Flagged “mailbox” under Reminders. You could drag this to the bottom of the list, though, to get it out of the way.

I’ve added more detailed instructions in Example 3.

Sort by color rules
Mr. Tsai: Won’t the flag by color rules in your 5.6.2 example 3 conflict with a drone setup where each account has it’s own Spam mailbox? It seems like the flag by color rules would put all messages into one Spam mailbox.

That’s right. To use the flag color rules with the drone setup, you’d need to have one set of flag color rules per account. Each rule, instead of saying “Every Message,” would have to match the proper account.