Drowning in mail that's not junk but definitely isn't important? You're not alone.
Spam isn't the only thing that clogs up your inbox. Because only a fraction of the emails we get are high priority, they're sometimes lost in the barrage of regular emails that we get. Google is trying to fix that with a new feature that sorts your important, high priority emails that need addressing straight away from the not so important correspondence that you can probably take a few days to get back to.
Dubbed the Priority Inbox, the beta feature acts sort of like a turbo spam filter, learning your Gmail habits by looking at what emails you read and who you frequently respond to. It then splits your inbox into three sections, showing the most important in the first, top section. Underneath that are your starred emails, and under that is an 'everything else' inbox with all your regular emails. You can also add more boxes to this (such as 'unread and important') and tweak a number of other Priority Inbox settings.
Obviously it doesn't get everything right, but it's reportedly pretty accurate. If it does mislabel something, all you have to do is mark it unimportant/important yourself (by clicking the little yellow label seen above) and all mail going forward will be affected by your interferance. The more you use it, the more accurate it will become.
You should see Priority Inbox hit your Gmail in the next week or so as Google is rolling it out to all users. Let us know what you think!
much email at work that I am not
able to keep with the "mark as
read" fast enough
this is why I love the
ability to setup rules so that
no email goes unsorted or
decided upon.
with my emails sorted
into folders I can easily look
through the folders I want
to look at and read my spam
years later ... haha
This will be usefull for when people are waiting for a important email, but don't want to have to wait and sort out all of there emails...
Correction:
* Let's just stick with the standard spelling.
Oh, wait, sorry, got off track. Its a nifty idea, but man, its sets a bad precident. Sure, in the past, you could have said Google isn't evil and wouldn't do something bad, but I think their dealings with Verizon just goes to show Google was just playing dumb. Pretty soon, they will allow people to PAY to deliver emails directly to your "important" section. Don't think it will happen? Yahoo! already tried this years ago (with limited success). However, since they prioritize your emails along with the paid ones, you'll just go on happily using the service, those paid emails just the cost of such wonderful convenience.
You can star all your labeled emails (just select a label, and star all those emails), then select all the un-starred emails from the dropdown box at the top left.
Also, I think the second part is kind of paranoid. I think it's more likely that Google wants to sell Gmail as an Outlook alternative to businesses, and make more money from adds. It would be a foolish business decision to do what you proposed.
I love the rules in Gmail and have some 1000+ I would guess but some spam still comes in.