Gmail Testing New Custom Inboxes, Simplified Priority Inbox

Gmail's Priority Box has been one of the best new features to land in the email client for a long time. Power users in particular appreciate any help they can get in sorting through the ever-increasing amount of email to find the messages that are the most relevant to them.

But even now that Priority Inbox has been rolled out to everyone, not all users have switched or even know what the new feature brings to the table.

This is probably the reason for a new experiment which tries to educate users on how Priority Inbox works, but also offer some simpler versions of the feature, sorting options really, to enable users to both customize their experience as well as ease into Priority Inbox.

The experiment enables users to change the way their Inbox works. They're notified that they can change the way their incoming messages are sorted, they can use the Classic option, like the regular Inbox, Important first, Unread first, Starred or the full-blown Priority Inbox.

There is also a notification at the top enabling users to quickly switch between the options mentioned above via a tab menu.

The idea is to educate users on what choices they have and also enable them to switch to something like Unread first, which is still an improvement over the regular Inbox.

Of course, advanced users may have already figured out that they can customize their Priority Inbox, to display the sections they want in the order they want, via the Settings section.

By default, there is an "Important and unread" section, followed by a Starred section, followed by everything else. But users can remove or add sections, up to four, and set them to display only Unread or only Important messages and so on.

Google is experimenting with the new simplified customization options, but this looks like something that will be eventually rolled out, with some tweaks perhaps. [via Google OS]