Red Reynolds

Google launched Priority Inbox today and I am incredibly excited to see how this can help me with piles of email: 

Priority Inbox uses information such as keywords, the people you e-mail the most and your e-mail habits to select the most pressing e-mails in your inbox. Those e-mails are brought to the top of your Gmail and marked as important so you deal with them first.

Priority Inbox is also an adaptive algorithm. Marking items as important or unimportant teaches the system what types of messages you deem the most urgent. You can also use Gmail’s filters to automatically mark certain messages as important (for example, from your boss or your spouse). – Mashable

I imagined it will take people some time to begin trusting the choices Google makes, and just like the iPhone typing correction tool it will need some context with you to make the best suggestions possible. 

The “Priority Inbox” can be reached by clicking that name just above the normal “Inbox” link in your Gmail interface. Once clicked, emails are grouped into three area:

• Important and Unread (Top)
• Starred (Middle)
• Everything Else (Bottom) 

Gmail’s product manager says they have been working on the feature for 18 months even though a weak version was part of the original Gmail prototypes many years ago.