Gmail Priority inbox promises to prioritise your email

Google has launched a new Priority inbox system for its gmail users that automatically sorts your email based on what it believes are important and not so important emails.

Working in a similar, but considerably more simplified, way to the Xobni Outlook plug-in, the new offering which went live on Tuesday has been created out of the notion that we all get a lot of email and most of that email is not that important.

Google is hoping that Gmail users will now be able to cut through the rubbish and get to the important emails, based on a series of factors and algorithms rather than human intervention.

"Gmail has always been pretty good at filtering junk mail into the 'spam' folder. 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'", says Doug Aberdeen, a software engineer at Google in a blog post about the new feature. "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. In a way, Priority Inbox is like your personal assistant, helping you focus on the messages that matter without requiring you to set up complex rules".

The new Priority Inbox will be rolling out to all Gmail users, including those of you who use Google Apps, over the next week or so and when you get it your gmail account will be split into three sections:  “Important and unread,” “Starred” and “Everything else”:

"As messages come in, Gmail automatically flags some of them as important. Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most (if you email Bob a lot, a message from Bob is probably important) and which messages you open and reply to (these are likely more important than the ones you skip over)", says Google.

Users will be able to then help the system by rating email more important or less important.

Once you see the "New! Priority Inbox" link in the top right corner of your Gmail account (or the new Priority Inbox tab in Gmail Settings), take a look recommends the company.