Earlier this week, Gmail introduced priority inbox in beta stage. The concept is simple, it prioritizes the emails in your inbox and displays the important ones on the top and the rest later. As I see it, this is fine tuning the filter that discards spam, and separates the chaff from the grain within the mails that are not junk.
A link appeared on the top right hand corner in bright yellow color on gmail for all users a few hours back. It said Priority Inbox – beta. A whimsical video with a catchy tune basically tells you what it is all about. You have a choice to either enable the new feature or stick with your mundane inbox.
Once you activate priority inbox, gmail runs through your latest set of emails and pre-selects some as important and the rest as not-so-important. Gmail asks your to review the priority it has set and you can fix the priority for individual emails, and the system corrects the priority at its end, and the next time around, the emails you marked as important will appear on the top.
Gmail leverages on an algorithm which studies your behavior. It keeps track of the mails you read and the ones you discard without opening it. The thought of tracking my mail reading habits is scary but if it serves the purpose, I am happy. The system identifies the mails you read as important and the rest as pseudo-spam, meaning not important.
Your inbox is sub divided into three sections. The section that appears on the top is the set of prioritized emails. It is followed by a section dedicated for mails that are starred. You can conveniently star your emails to be processed later, and this is one of my favorite features in the new gmail. The final section is for the mails that are not important, and as you would guess, it appears right at the bottom, probably not in the visible fold of your screen.
My experience with priority inbox is limited but its capability of learning from my reading behavior and manual prioritizing is perhaps the strongest feature of them all. The theory applies not only to humans but also to systems – if you are not growing, then you are dying. And, google has made a strong point to the case.
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