Aug 31, 2010 07:36 GMT  ·  By
Priority Inbox is already available to some users and will be rolled out to everyone over a week
   Priority Inbox is already available to some users and will be rolled out to everyone over a week

Email overload is more of a problem today than it has ever been, even after email was supposed to have become irrelevant several times already. The fact is that email is still one of the most important, if not the most important communications tool for most people.

But managing the hundreds of new emails every day is a daunting task, one that no one has been able to fix so far and not for lack of trying.

The Gmail team is now having its go at it with Priority Inbox which, as the name suggests, is a new inbox sorting paradigm which emphasizes importance over the simple chronological ordering that most email clients have applied so far.

"Today, we’re happy to introduce Priority Inbox (in beta)—an experimental new way of taking on information overload in Gmail. Gmail has always been pretty good at filtering junk mail into the 'spam' folder," Doug Aberdeen, Software Engineer at Google, wrote.

"But today, in addition to spam, people get a lot of mail that isn't outright junk but isn't very important—bologna, or 'bacn'," he added.

"So we've evolved Gmail's filter to address this problem and extended it to not only classify outright spam, but also to help users separate this 'bologna' from the important stuff," he explained.

Priority Inbox splits your regular inbox into three sections. At the very top, there's the "Important and unread" section. This is followed by a "Starred" section and then "Everything else."

Gmail automatically sends some messages to the Important section and the rest to Everything else. The way it selects the messages deemed important is by looking at your previous conversations with that contact, if any, and also if you usually open or reply to messages from that email address.

It also looks at things like keywords a message contains and how often do you open email with those keywords, or if the message is sent only to you and not to a number of people.

In time, Gmail should become better at knowing which messages are important to you and which aren't. And you can also give it a helping hand by marking the messages that are important to you and the ones that aren't.

Priority Inbox is still in beta but will be rolled out to everyone, including Apps users, over the next week.