This is hard?
I'm surprised by the number of comments saying this is hard. Go to conditional formatting, create a rule, tell it how to format your message, tell it the conditions for when it should format and then click OK. It's hard to see how this could be boiled down much more without taking away flexibility. And this seems to be a feature for people that want a lot of control over their messages, not for the casual user.
I agree that finding the conditional formatting section in the first place is a bit of a pain. Outlook 2010 is not too bad, but this is one of those things Microsoft move around and rename in every version of Outlook they release. I've always found right-clicking a column heading and choosing View Settings is the easiest way to get there, and it seems fairly consistent across Outlook versions.
