[hugh]

To help users deal with a plethora of email flooding their inboxes, Google has announced that beginning next week, it will introduce Priority Inbox, an experimental new way of taking on information overload in Gmail.

In addition to sending Junk mail to the Spam filter, Gmail will now split your inbox into three sections: “Important and unread,” “Starred” and “Everything else.”

The way it works is that as messages come in, Gmail automatically flags some of them as important. Google says it 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).

The company says that over time, Gmail will get better at categorizing messages and you can improve the sortation of email by clicking a plus or minus button 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.

Priority Inbox will be rolling out to all Gmail users in the next week. You’ll know you have it when you see a "New! Priority Inbox" link in the top right corner of your Gmail account.

 

[PFD]

If it works well, it would be very welcome.

 

[North_of_Calgary]

I got it yesterday and I didn't really like it. Mainly because I read all of my email.

Had it on for 30 seconds, said "yuk" and removed it. There's a new option/tab under "settings" that allows you to turn it on and off.

I like their innovation - this one just isn't right for me.

 

[hugh]

I read all mine too so it wouldn't be great for me but I know some people with over 1,000 emails in their inbox.

 

[North_of_Calgary]

The idea behind Gmail when it was first released was "archive" vs. "delete" your mail. When they did the initial launch of it on TechTV back in 2004, that was their motto. They really wanted you to never delete an email. That being said, I personally delete all the time and have a tiny inbox.

If (unlike me) you do follow their concept, you should be archiving and muting mail all the time. (Notice with iOS4 the default button action changed to "ARCHIVE" on the iPhone.) If you're archiving an muting a lot then you should click on the "All Mail" link and look in the top right and see the total number of conversations. I've heard of Google employees with 250K-1M conversations and still being in the 15GB-20GB of storage range.

So if you're in the 100K or more conversations and mailboxes in the 10GB+ range then I could see this as being a useful feature because you're clearly getting massive amounts of mail. But otherwise (for the most of us) it seems like a waste of processing power to me.

Now let's play the game of "who has the most conversations in all mail" and the biggest mailbox?

 

[TechieFreak]

Now let's play the game of "who has the most conversations in all mail" and the biggest mailbox?

Bottom of my Gmail page says... "You are currently using 1099 MB (14%) of your 7493 MB."

 

[North_of_Calgary]

I thought that the priority inbox only applies to Google Apps accounts - that's the only place I've seen it:

You are currently using 233 MB (0%) of your 25600 MB.

 

[Dr.Dave]

From the Google blog:

After lots of internal testing here at Google, as well as with Gmail and Google Apps users at home and at work, we’re ready for more people to try it out. Priority Inbox will be rolling out to all Gmail users, including those of you who use Google Apps, over the next week or so. Once you see the "New! Priority Inbox" link in the top right corner of your Gmail account (or the new Priority Inbox tab in Gmail Settings), take a look.

Maybe Google Apps users are getting it first.

 

[North_of_Calgary]

Ah, thanks Dr.Dave. Yes you must be right - rolling out to Apps users first as I've only seen the feature in my Apps accounts. I don't have it yet in any my vanilla accounts.

Let's call this a first - usually Apps is 6-12 months behind the rest!!

 

[North_of_Calgary]

Update: got it in the vanilla account just now. Still not going to use it

 

[PFD]

Got it today. I've set it up. We'll see how well it works. It's just a filter anyways, not a big deal to switch between one and the other, so it can't be a bad thing. I often check my spam folder as well, since a few things end up in there.

 

[hugh]

I suspect the benefits will accrue over time as it begins to better recognize what is important and what is not.