This is a real winner! I have tried lots of new products and feature enhancements to help manage my daily flood of email, but the new Priority Inbox feature that Google has rolled out this week is the best I have seen in a long time. It was easy to setup and I found three overlooked important messages the first time I used it.
I have relied on Google’s excellent spam filters for years to sift the bogus crap out of my inbox, but I have trouble finding the messages from real people hidden in the jumble of newsletters, service update notices, the latest offers from my favourite companies, and those friends that insist on forwarding every email they read to everyone they know. I am sure that I am not alone.
Yes you can use your email client’s inbox rules to help sort things out, but what about when you use webmail or a mobile device to access your mail? Gmail’s server based filtering rules go a long way to help organize the chaos, but it is really tiresome to have manually add more and more special case filtering rules every time I subscribe to an email newsletter, or I add a new client.
What if my inbox paid attention to which messages I tend to read first or most often? What if it looked at who I actively engage with new messages and replies? What if it used that information to predictively sort my messages, putting the ones I am most likely to want to see at the top? Enter Google’s new Priority Inbox.
Google began rolling out this new feature to Gmail users on Monday. It is now saying that Priority Inbox should be available to all users (including Google Apps users) today. To activate it, look for the “New! Priority Inbox” message in the top right corner of your Gmail window. You will still have access to the regular inbox view, but I am betting that after you train the new priority filter, it’s unlikely that you’ll go back.
Try it out and let me know what you think.
