Google addresses email overload with priority inbox

James Etherington-Smith

James is journalist and sub-editor at MyBroadband, and editor at MyGaming. He is an avid gamer with an exceptional knowledge about gaming and related hardware...

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Gmail is already well known for its ability to accurately filter spam, but Google has announced its intent to take it a step further with Priority Inbox.
 
While the feature is still in beta, Google says that the idea is to separate the important messages, as well as those that need replies, from everything else.
 
“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,” Doug Aberdeen writes on the Gmail blog.
 
You will also be able to help train the categorizing algorithm by clicking on a plus or minus button to indicate whether a conversation is more or less important.
 
The Priority Inbox is divided into three sections, Google explained.

Important and unread
Starred
Everything else
 
The idea is that you’ll want to read everything in the “important and unread” section, star mail that you need to come back to or need to refer to and scan everything else, marking important messages Google may have missed.
 
According to Google the feature is rolling out over “the next week or so” to all Gmail users, including those accessing their mail via Google Apps.
 
At the time of writing no-one at MyBroadband had access to the new feature.

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