If you are suffering from email overload, then Google’s latest innovation for Gmail, simply called ‘Priority Inbox’, is certainly worth checking out.
For many users, particularly if you are signed up to lots of automated newsletters and email updates from companies, it can be overwhelming to open up their email in a morning and sort the wheat from the chaff.
Learns email habits
Gmail’s Priority Inbox attempts to learn your e-mail habits and then decides which messages are most important to you, and thus bumps them up the list for you to check them first.
Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: “Important and unread,” “Starred” and “Everything else”:
It is, in basic terms, an automated way of doing what many already do by setting up manual filters in their Gmail.
Google Software Engineer Doug Aberdeen, explains the thinking behind Priority Inbox (which is currently in beta) as follows: “Our inboxes are slammed with hundreds, sometimes thousands of messages a day—mail from colleagues, from lists, about appointments and automated mail that’s often not important. It’s time-consuming to figure out what needs to be read and what needs a reply.”
Aberdeen says that, in addition to spam, people get a lot of mail that isn't outright junk but isn't very important— known as bologna, or “bacn.”
“So we've evolved Gmail's filter to address this problem and extended it to not only classify outright spam, but also to help users separate this "bologna" from the important stuff. In a way, Priority Inbox is like your personal assistant, helping you focus on the messages that matter without requiring you to set up complex rules.”
