Gmail Priority Inbox Finds Your Important Emails

I am sure getting overwhelmed by email everyday is the norm these days. I am no different.

But, with Gmail and its filters and labels and stars and zillion cool labs features, I try keep my sanity when I am looking at my inbox.

And it works to a certain extent. Still a lot of the work in managing my inbox involves me spending a time deciding what is important and what is not.

Enter Priority Inbox feature in Gmail.

Gmail is good about marking spam mails but we sign up and subscribe and get tons of emails that aren’t outright spam but just serve to contribute to distraction and disrupting out productivity. Basically they are not as important as some other emails.

Priority Inbox basically tries to cull those and separate the important emails from the rest of the noise. It does so by analyzing who you email the most, which emails you open and reply and other signals.

Priority Inbox is like your personal assistant, helping you focus on the messages that matter without requiring you to set up complex rules.

Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: “Important and unread,” “Starred” and “Everything else”:

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.)

Once this feature is enabled on your Gmail account, you will see a notification in Red on near the Settings link in Gmail. You can activate it from there. Google is rolling this feature out to everyone in the next week.

Once, activated you can customize the settings in a few ways. I have set it up to show Important and unread messages at the top, starred messages next, Important and read messages next and then everything else. You can also reset this in different order as well as set up the number of emails you want to see in each section independently.

Plus, you can also set if you want to see the regular Inbox or Priority Inbox on opening Gmail.

I love Gmail and they just keep adding more and more goodness to it!

Here is a video about this feature

{ via Google blog }