Skip to main content

Gmail Priority Inbox Sorts Your Email For You.



Email overload has finally met its match. Tomorrow, Gmail is rolling out a new feature called Priority Inbox that is going to be a Godsend for those of you who dread opening your email. In short, Google has built a system that figures out which of your messages are important, and presents them at the top of the screen so you don’t miss them. The rest of your messages are still there, but you don’t have to dig through dozens of newsletters and confirmations to find the diamonds in rough.
The beauty of the system lies in its simplicity — it’s nearly as easy as Gmail’s one click spam filter. There’s almost no setup: once it’s activated on your account, you’ll see a prompt asking you if you want to enable Priority Inbox. You can choose from a few options (the order of your various inboxes and if there are any contacts you’d like to always mark ‘Important’) but don’t have to setup any rules or ‘teach’ Gmail what you want it to mark important. It just works, at least most of the time.

The system uses a plethora of criteria to decide which messages are most important: things like how frequently you open and/or respond to messages from a given sender, how often you read messages that contain a certain keyword, and whether or not the message is addressed solely to you or looks like it was sent to a mailing list. If you come across a message that’s been marked important when it shouldn’t have been, you can hit an arrow to tell Gmail it’s messed up. Likewise, if a message that should have been flagged gets sent to the ‘everything else’ area, you can promote it. Through these actions Gmail gets progressively smarter, so the system should work better over time.

I’ve been using the service since late last week and have found it to work very well. Occasionally messages that shouldn’t have been marked ‘Important’ are flagged, but I’ve yet to encounter an urgent message that slipped into the ‘everything else’ section. My colleague MG Siegler, who has also had the feature active, has had similar success.
It’s great. I love it. But it isn’t perfect.
My biggest gripe so far is the fact that there’s no way to tell why a given message has been deemed important. Oftentimes it’s obvious — emails from my coworkers are generally given the golden arrows, as are messages from PR contacts whom I frequently communicate with. But occasionally there are oddballs that have been marked important for no apparent reason.
Sure, it’s easy to tell Gmail that ‘this message is not important’ and strip its golden badge. But what if the message was marked important for a reason that is usually sound (perhaps it contains a reference to TechCrunch Disrupt, for example)? It would be nice if I could tell Gmail something to the effect of “this sender is never important”, but not to start frowning on whatever keywords the message contained. Still, it’s a great start.
Of course, this introduces a new dynamic to the way a lot of people are going to be reading email. Email intros will become ever more important, because you’ll want to ensure that your message gets marked with coveted ‘important’ tag.  It also has much broader implications. Increasingly, content will be displayed to you based on its importance rather than its time stamp — not just when it comes to browsing email, but for social networks and other content as well.
Priority Inbox will be rolling out to Gmail and Google Apps users alike over the course of the week.
More:


Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document?  That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the docum...
1 comment
Read more

Boom, the startup that wants to build supersonic planes, just signed a massive deal with Virgin

Have you heard about Boom? Boom is a relatively new startup that’s aiming to build something pretty crazy. They’re not building an app… or a social network… or even some new gadget for the Kickstarter crowd. Boom wants to build planes. Really, really, really fast planes. Specifically, they’re trying to design and build a supersonic passenger plane that goes 2.2x the speed of sound. If all goes to plan, they’ll be able to shuttle people from New York to London in 3.5 hours, and SF to Tokyo in 4.5. Sound crazy? I wouldn’t disagree. It’s worth noting that the company is in the very early days for something as intensive, massive, and hugely expensive as designing and producing a passenger aircraft. They’re still working on their first prototype, and hope to fly it by late next year. But it’s also worth noting that the team behind the plane has some serious talent in its blood: the company’s 11 employees have collectively contributed to over 30 aircrafts — having worked on thin...
Post a Comment
Read more

Fun Tools to Translate Your Name into Japanese Calligraphy

Japanese calligraphy is an artistic writing style of the Japanese language. Its Chinese origins can be traced back to the twenty-eighth century BCE. Calligraphy found its way into Japanese culture in 600 CE and is known as the karayo tradition. For Westerners, calligraphy is forever fascinating. However, it takes years to learn how to properly draw the signs. Two basic principles must be known to understand Japanese writing: there are different writing styles and different alphabets. Kaisho for example, is a writing style most commonly used in print media. Tensho on the other hand is used in signatures. Other writing styles are Reisho, Gyosho and Sousho. The alphabets include Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana. Katakana is used for writing foreign words. It can also serve to highlight words, in analogy to capital letters as we know them from the Roman / Latin alphabet (Romaji in Japanese). Each Kanji character has a meaning of its own, while Hiragana or Katakana characters merely repres...
Post a Comment
Read more