Google introduces Priority Inbox for Gmail

If you’re the kind of person who is constantly receiving vast amounts of email from all over the place (friends, family, special offers, subscription renewals, junk and spam) and having a hard time organizing it all, you are going to jump for joy when Priority Inbox for Gmail hits your account.  Here is the problem Google is attempting to solve with Priority Inbox.  You receive so many emails every day and sometimes it is hard to sort and find what’s important and what isn’t.  Google prides itself for doing a pretty decent job of filtering out all the junk email into the spam folder.  Priority Inbox takes things one step further:

As messages come in, Gmail automatically flags some of them as important. Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most (if you email Bob a lot, a message from Bob is probably important) and which messages you open and reply to (these are likely more important than the ones you skip over). And as you use Gmail, it will get better at categorizing messages for you. You can help it get better by clicking the (+) or (-) buttons at the top of the inbox to correctly mark a conversation as important or not important. (You can even set up filters to always mark certain things important or unimportant, or rearrange and customize the three inbox sections.)

Neat, huh?  That last part there is the most promising.  Over time Priority Inbox gets better at predicting what messages are important to you.  The new feature will automatically sort your messages into these three folders: important and unread, starred, and everything else.  You have the option to customize and rename these folders if you like.  Priority Inbox is currently in beta and is being rolled out to all Gmail users over the course of this week.  Once you see the “New! Priority Inbox” link at the top right corner of your Gmail window, click it to give it a try.  The video embedded above will help explain this new Gmail feature to you in a brief animation.

[Via GoogleBlog]

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