My wife and I both use Mail.app’s Column Layout on our Macs (Air and Pro). She recently started using flagged messages as an organizing tactic — I have been doing so for some time — and I noticed that her flagged messages weren’t showing up as such in the message summary. The Flags column on her display wasn’t visible like it was for me.

I went searching for how to customize the columns that appear when View > Column Layout is chosen. A straight answer did not appear on the first several pages of Google results — including in usually reliable places like Apple forums and Stack Exchange. So I offer this short note to fill that gap.

My hope is that once Google’s ubiquitous spiders have performed their tender ministrations, people will be able to find here the simple answer to their simple question.

I should probably throw in an SEO paragraph or two saying things like “This article will teach you how to customize the columns that appear in Mail.app’s Column Layout,” and “When you have finished reading you will know how to customize the columns that appear in Mail.app’s Column Layout.” But I hate that artificial and sterile verbal logorrhea SEO, whose intended audience is the Googlebot and not the human.

Here’s the secret: right-click (control-click) in the row of column header labels. You will see a popup like the one above. Select the columns you want and you are done.

Well, nearly done. You will probably want to tweak the columns’ appearance. You can grab a column by its header label to rearrange its display order, and you can grab its right-hand border to resize it.

Now you know how to customize the columns that appear in Mail.app’s Column Layout. (Pace, Googlebot, and for you humans: See what I did there? And please forgive me.)