Days after introducing voice calling within Gmail, Google on Tuesday unveiled a "priority inbox" feature within Gmail intended to highlight important messages.
Priority Inbox will automatically filter incoming Gmail messages to place the most important messages up top, followed by starred e-mails, and then everything else underneath. Priority Inbox can be customized, however, to display the categories of your choice.
Once enabled, there will be a link on the left-hand bar for "Priority Inbox" atop the "Inbox" link, so users can switch back to their regular view if they choose. Users can also choose whether Google takes them to Priority Inbox or regular Inbox upon sign-in.
What type of messages will end up in the Priority Inbox? The system is constantly evolving, Rajen Sheth, a senior product manager for Google Enterprise, said in a phone interview, but if there is a thread to which you respond very frequently or certain types of messages that you often read very quickly, they would likely end up designated as priority.
"They start to be useful to people right away," Sheth said.
If Google flags something as priority and you do not agree, you can use the plus and minus buttons atop the page to notify Google that that e-mail is less important.
Priority Inbox will be rolling out to all Gmail users in the next few days. When it hits your inbox, there will be a "New! Priority Inbox" link on the top, right-hand corner of your Gmail inbox, which you can click to activate.
The idea behind Priority Inbox was to combat inbox information overload, Sheth said, pointing to the extra time the average employee takes to sift through mountains of e-mail. Google has been testing Priority Inbox for "quite awhile" internally, Sheth said, and "testers are spending 6 percent less time managing their e-mail, [which] translates to over a week of additional time each year."
"This is the next evolutionary step in making the inbox more intelligent and letting people deal with information overload," Sheth said. "Over the past 20 years, the inbox has just been a chronological list [of e-mails], and this breaks out of that paradigm."
Google envisions this being useful for the average Gmail user as well as its Google Apps customers, who will be able to access Priority Inbox if their admin has selected "Enable pre-release features" in the control panel.
"Obviously e-mail is tremendously critical to business users, and being able to save time is very, very valuable," Sheth said. "And literally time equals money in the business context, [so] we think this is going to be a great feature for our Google Apps users overall."
"But we also think it's going to have a great impact on our consumer users," he said, pointing to the level of organization Priority Inbox has brought to his own Gmail account.
Given Google's experience with producing relevant results via its core search product, Sheth said taking that to the inbox was a natural progression.
"Google is very well-suited to do this in that we're all about providing you with relevant information," he said. "[We thought that] if we could bring Google.com-like relevancy to your inbox, it would make your inbox a lot better."