We propose a new lossless progressive compression algorithm based on rate-distortion optimization for meshes with color attributes; the quantization precision of both the geometry and the color information is adapted to each intermediate mesh during the encoding/decoding process. This quantization precision can either be optimally determined with the use of a mesh distortion measure or be quasi-optimally decided based on an analysis of the mesh complexity in order to reduce the calculation time. Furthermore, we proposea new metric which estimates the geometry and color importance of each vertex during the simplification in order to preserve faithfully the feature elements. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithm for colored meshes and competes with the most efficient algorithms for non colored meshes.