14 DAY TRIAL // Google is continuing to look for new ways to help users deal with the increasing amount of email they receive every day. On the trails of the Priority Inbox, which has proven quite popular, comes the Smart Labels feature which automatically labels several message types and also removes them from the inbox.
While anyone can do this by themselves, using filters and labels, a built-in feature should come in handy for those that don't like to fiddle too much with the settings. For now, Smart Labels is in Labs, but it could be developed into a full feature.
"Last year, we launched Priority Inbox to automatically sort incoming email and help you focus on the messages that matter most. Today, we're launching a complementary feature in Gmail Labs called Smart Labels, which helps you classify and organize your email," Stanley Chen, Software Engineer at Google, wrote.
"Once you turn it on from the Labs tab in Settings, Smart Labels automatically categorizes incoming Bulk, Notification and Forum messages, and labels them as such," he explained.
By default, Smart Labels uses these three categories to label email that you may not want clogging up your inbox. By default, with the feature enabled, any email that is determined to belong to one of the categories is labeled as such and also skips the inbox.
You can customize this so that they won't be sent to the archive by default, just labeled, by going to the Filter tabs in Gmail Settings. In fact, the three smart labels are filters just like the ones you can set up yourself.
The feature could prove quite useful and, it it's going to be built into Gmail, it should have an impact for quite a lot of people. What's more, it may also get users interested in Filters and what they can do so they can start setting up their own ways of managing incoming email.