In this paper, capacity and security issues of text steganography have been considered by employing LZW compression technique and color coding based approach. The proposed technique uses the forward mail platform to hide the secret data. This algorithm first compresses secret data and then hides the compressed secret data into the email addresses and also in the cover message of the email. The secret data bits are embedded in the message (or cover text) by making it colored using a color coding table. Experimental results show that the proposed method not only produces a high embedding capacity but also reduces computational complexity. Moreover, the security of the proposed method is significantly improved by employing stego keys. The superiority of the proposed method has been experimentally verified by comparing with recently developed existing techniques.