Slate: Gmail's New Priority Inbox
In Slate magazine's recent article "Sorted Affair", Farhad Manjoo explains the new Priority Inbox that will be released into Google's Gmail application today. Essentially, it's a reversed spam filter.
Although companies have successfully blocked spam from entering our inboxes, it still manages to become cluttered with legitimate email, says Manjoo. Messages like friend requests from social networking sites, news alerts about breaking news, or messages from office mates about a cake in the kitchen have been a pain to deal with in the past. Google's new sorting features sifts through your daily mail and picks out messages you're likely to deem important. The new system, called Priority Inbox, looks for signals that a message is especially valuable, analyzing your experience with a certain sender, if the message is a reply to an email you sent, or if you were sent a message as part of an email list. If a message makes the threshold for importance, Gmail marks it with a small yellow tag and displays it at the top of your inbox, above the rest of your mail.
Manjoo has used the Priority Inbox for over a week and says Google is taking steps to continually improve the service. They have added two buttons that let you train the system - you press one button to mark a message as important, and another to mark it unimportant. If you want to activate Priority Inbox, simply go to Gmail right now and turn on the Priority Inbox. (Google will be rolling this option out to all Gmail users over the next few days.) If you don't like it, you'll be able to toggle back to Gmail's classic, chronological view.
Upon activation, you will see three sections. The top section is marked "Important and Unread", the self-cleaning section that drops messages as they are read and responded to. The second section contains e-mail you've already read and have marked as important, and the final section includes everything else - messages that aren't spam, but aren't important. That being the default layout for Priority Inbox, there are setting that let you tweak these sections in various ways.
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