Google Priority Inbox - auto-sorting the sheep from the goats

Anthony Caruana
Tuesday, 31 August 2010 15:36

Your IT - Mobility

Google’s Gmail service is the email service of choice for millions of people and it’s spam filtering is one of the reasons many like it so much. Google is now applying its search and filter technology to the task of prioritising the most important messages in your inbox with Priority Inbox.

Over the coming weeks, Google will be adding a new service to its Gmail and Google Apps customers. Priority Inbox will look at how you process your email and sort your messages into three convenient buckets.By recording what you do with specific messages and how you interact with particular people Priority Inbox filters and sorts your email into three sections: “Important and unread”, “Starred” and “Everything else”.  This is built upon similar technology to Google's spam filtering and search capability.

 

Today, Gmail users do this manually by marking messages with a star and retrieving them later from the “Starred” folder. Others use the “starred” folder to collate messages that require later follow up or use a label. Either way, the process is manual and, if you receive a lot of email each day, it can be very time consuming.

The software isn’t expected to be perfect but Google provides a way to easily train it and it will improve its predictions over time. Messages can be promoted and demoted through the three categories by clicking a small button that's adjacent to each message. These flags can also be set by rules so that you can force messages that meet specific criteria into the correct categories. For example, even though you don’t often email your boss, you can have a rule that puts email from your boss automatically into the “Important and unread” bucket.

Priority Inbox will be rolled out to all Gmail and Google Apps users 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), you’ll be able to use it.