Hands On with Gmail Priority Inbox

Google this week announced the beta of a new feature for Gmail, called Priority Inbox, a mail-organizing tool designed to bring messages users care most about to the forefront.

The opt-in feature will start showing up in Gmail accounts as a featured link in the upper-right of the inbox. While all Webmail services try to filter out blatant spam, players like Gmail and Hotmail are going further than this lately, targeting not only spam, but also "bologna" and "bacn" - or e-mail that isn't exactly junk mail—like those travel newsletters you signed up for—but isn't a priority either.

To get started with Priority Inbox, you can watch the clever video that the folks at Gmail have produced (and which has irked some Chrome users by playing its honkytonk automatically upon sign-in). The video shows whimsically how Priority Inbox groups your e-mail into categories (not counting pure spam, which it relegates to the spam folder)—Important and Unread, Starred, and Everything else. Actually, if you get into the settings, you can create another category, either "just important" or "just unread."

How does Google determine what's important? They claim it's based on whom you respond to and those you e-mail the most. Since I was testing with an account I don't use heavily, the only thing in my Important and Unread section was the e-mail from the "Gmail Team" telling me about the feature—even though I've never e-mailed or responded to that address. Fortunately, you can tune importance with plus and minus buttons that appear in the middle of the nine buttons above your e-mail list.

Starring is good for keeping messages you've already read handy, though you could just create another Important section, which shows messages whether you've read them or not. Links to the right of each section let you show only Important and Unread e-mails or only starred messages, but the equivalent link next to Everything Else shows all e-mails, including the important and starred stuff.

For the higher priority sections you can also decide how many items to display—5, 10, 25, or 50. And you can choose to hide empty sections or archive their contents. You can also have Priority Inbox override any mail filters you've set. A final option is to turn off the priority markers, but, at least at first, this doesn't seem like a good options, as it reminds you that you've already marked the message.

At one point, I clicked the Show Inbox link, and all the prioritization went away. You have to click the Priority Inbox in the left panel of folders and other Gmail features to get it back. The default behavior is to display the last view you chose, but you can go into Settings and choose to always show Priority Inbox when Gmail opens.

Yahoo Mail has had a feature similar to Priority Inbox since January, showing you top e-mails from known contacts on its What's New page, while Windows Live Hotmail has its Sweep feature to let you deal with newsletter overload and the like, though it requires you to select the senders you want to relegate to a subfolder. As TechFlash's Todd Bishop points out, Microsoft has had e-mail prioritization technology for over a decade, even holding relevant patents, but for some reason the company hasn't included it in Hotmail.

Users of the Chrome browser should be aware that there have been reports of the Priority Inbox video's sound playing automatically when they enter their Gmail inboxes. A Google employee posted on the service's forum that the company was working on a fix.

While the prioritization Priority Inbox offers is welcome, I still find it visually complicated—more text in an already very text-heavy interface. Yahoo and Hotmail's "from contacts" filters are easier-on-the-eyes. But Google's automation saves you from having to designate contacts beforehand to see the important stuff float to the top, which is a big plus in these days of bacn-filled inboxes.