Mountain View, California — Google has took the wraps off a new tool late Monday for its free Web-based Gmail service that helps users sorts incoming email into three sections, based on their perceived importance and steer clear of drowning in the floods of digital messages that have become part of modern life.
The new service called “Priority Inbox,” for its Gmail will be released with the beta, or test, label and is being described for now as “experimental” by the company. The Priority Inbox in Gmail segregates incoming messages into one of three categories. An automated program separates “Important and unread” messages from those that are “Starred” and “Everything else.”
“Gmail employs a variety of marks to predict which messages are important,” Google software engineer Doug Aberdeen said in a blog post.
“And as you use Gmail, it will get better at categorizing messages for you.”
New feature: Google has announced the new feature will Prioritize Gmail users’ emails.
Introducing the new feature, Google said in a statement: “As messages come in, Gmail automatically flags some of them as important. For instance, higher status is given to messages from people a Gmail user sends email to often,” according to Aberdeen.
The inspiration behind Priority Inbox is Google’s conviction that the problem of e-mail overburden continues getting worse, forcing people to spend much time and effort managing their inbox both for personal and work-related matters.
Approximately 294 billion email messages are sent daily, with a typical person dealing with about 150 of them daily, according to references cited by Google. Priority Inbox is an additional, optional view of inbox messages. People who choose it can toggle back to other more conventional views, such as listing messages chronologically by arrival timestamp or alphabetically by the senders’ names or subject lines.
“People tell us all that time that they are getting more and more mail and often feel overwhelmed by it all,” Aberdeen said.
“It is time-consuming to figure out what needs to be read and what needs a reply.”
Matthew Glotzbach, director of product management in Google’s Enterprise division, views Priority Inbox as a sort of inverted spam filter which, rather than blocking and setting aside unsolicited messages, prioritizes items in the inbox so that users can attend more quickly to the most important e-mails.
“If you are in meetings and during an interval you come back to your e-mail and you have five minutes between appointments and you have 50 e-mails, which five messages do you spend your time on in that period of time?” Glotzbach said. Priority Inbox aims to automate that and simplify that decision, he said.
Google outlined its new filtering system as “your personal assistant, helping you focus on the messages that matter without requiring you to set up complex rules”.
Messages that initially start appearing in the new priority box will be based on an algorithm calculation that Gmail uses to assign priority factors such as the identity of the sender, phrases in the message and whether the sender is an individual or a company.
The objective is to separate emails from friends and family and make it appear above less important messages.
Internet search engine giant Google launched Gmail in April 2004 and now has an estimated 146 million monthly users worldwide. Google said in its blog that once users start seeing the “New! Priority Inbox” link at the top right of their Gmail account they can begin using the new function.
Google provides a variety of options for users to manually customize Priority Inbox settings and preferences if they so choose.
“We see this as an ongoing evolution of the focus of Gmail, which has always been around addressing this problem of information overload,” Glotzbach said.
All individual Gmail users will have access to it in the coming days. Availability for people who use it as part of Google Apps will depend on whether domain administrators allow their users to activate “pre-release” features.