I'm trying to set up conditional formatting rules in Outlook and it's driving me crazy. I'd appreciate any help.

I'm subscribed to a few listservs/mailing lists that inundate me with emails all day. I don't want to push those emails to separate folders because I know me and I know I'd never check them, and I do try to at least skim them every day. What I want to do is color every other message in my inbox so they stand out, and leave the listserv emails the default black.

One of the listservs always sends from listsender@lists.trialsmith.com, and includes "[kjamember]" in the subject line.

One of the listservs always sends from SeminarWeb <kjawebinars@seminarweb.com>.

One of the listservs always sends from info@kentuckyjusticeassociation.org and includes "EClips for Kentucky Justice Assocation" in the subject line.

So I went to View > View Settings > Conditional Formatting, and I set up a rule that set the font to blue for all read emails, and bold blue for all unread emails. For the condition, under the Advanced tab, I created a rule: Subject doesn't contain [kjamember].

This worked for the first set of emails. Voila, everything from kjamember was black and everything else was blue. But this turned the SeminarWeb and EClips emails blue, too. And setting up other rules to encompass the SeminarWeb and Eclips emails just won't work. Making a separate conditional-formatting rule to turn those emails black doesn't work. Adding those subject-line words or from: addresses to the existing, working rule doesn't work. They stay blue, like all non-[kjamember] emails.

Any advice? Thanks in advance.

This is the problem:

 I created a rule: Subject doesn't contain [kjamember].

That will apply to everything except kjamember. Create separate rules for each list, using contains.  If you want to use one rule, enable the querybuilder and create a contains rule with OR operators.