Tue 7 Sep 2010
About a week ago I was looking at my screen in the morning and wondering how to improve how I handle my e-mail. My key problem was lots of mail that is not spam but is also not real e-mail nor something I want to read every day – stuff like LinkedIn notifications, discussion groups, E-bay notifications and the like. I started to think of creating a filter structure to sort it out of the way, but didn’t get to implementing it when Google announced “Priority Inbox”.
GMail’s “Priority Inbox” is basically a spam filter in reverse. Rather than trying to guess what is junk it tries to guess what is it that the user would really like to read. Great idea – and pretty well implemented.
I was already using a GMail extension called “Multiple Inboxes” so my GMail screen was divided into three regions: the inbox, just unread e-mails and starred e-mails. Priority inbox plugs right into this set up and creates a fourth region – e-mails Google’s filter “thinks” I want to see.
Since I still keep on using an e-mail client (Thunderbird) with my GMail accounts I was glad to find that the “Priority Inbox” is also exposed as an IMAP folder.
So far I’m really enjoying this new feature. Even though it makes me more addicted and dependent on Google’s GMail service it came at exactly right time for me.
September 16th, 2010 at 7:43
Nice Post! It seems ‘Priority Inbox’ is useful for people who’ve got the habit of leaving the email in the inbox itself. I prefer to move my emails after an action is taken on them. So going for a Tool like Taroby http://www.taroby.com suits me more, as it employs better filtering, sorting of emails to show you the relevant ones with higher priority, and moving less important ones to respective folders.