With loads of spam and other unimportant emails cluttering your inbox, you may have wondered at times if you could, perhaps, create a hierarchy of emails — listing them by their importance. For instance, there are certain emails you may have responded to instantly. There are many others that you may have ignored. You open some emails regularly. Others you simply ignore and delete since you’re too lazy to unsubscribe from the emailing list.
The laundry list could be endless. Google, on its part, is attempting to ease this pain by thinking on your behalf. The online search giant calls this the ‘Priority Inbox!’. By automatically separating out your most important messages, the Priority Inbox makes it easy for you to read and respond to the messages that matter. At least this is what Google wants you to believe.
Try reading and replying to the messages in the “Important and Unread” section first. Mark anything that requires follow-up with a star, then go through the “Everything Else” section. If you leave Priority Inbox, you can return to it by clicking the link next to Inbox on the side navigation of Gmail.
This is how it works. Gmail’s servers look at several types of information to identify the email that’s important to you, including who you email and chat with most, how often you email with these people, and which keywords appear frequently in the emails you read.
If the Priority Inbox makes a mistake, you can use the Mark important Mark not important buttons to correctly mark a conversation as important or not important, and Priority Inbox will quickly learn what you care about most.
sections
You can customize the Priority Inbox to change what type of email you see in each section (like switching the “Important and Unread” section to just “Important”). Just click on the section headers or visit the Priority Inbox tab under Settings and choose to “customize inbox groups.” You can also use filters to guarantee importance: If you want to be absolutely sure that some messages are always marked as important (like email from your boss), you can set up a filter and choose “Always mark it as important.” You can search by importance: If you want to see all the messages that have been marked as important, both read and unread, do a Gmail search for “is:important.”
Best of all, you can switch back to your old inbox if you’re not happy with the way the Priority Inbox creates a hierarchy of your mails.
I guess it’s a bit too early too comment on this new feature. I’d rather give Google some time to learn my preferences and think on my behalf. By the way, the Google phone is cool. It’s worth giving a try.
