Google Mail and the new Priority Inbox.

Today I opened up by Gmail account to find a brand new feature. The priority inbox. This is an experiment by google which will attempt to reduce the amount of time we spend organising our emails. I suspect this is in response to recent changes made to Hotmail allowing you to group emails into different categories.

There are now 3 sections to my Gmail front page.

Important and unread emails - over time Google learns to prioritise your emails based on several factors such as: is the sender in your contacts list? How frequently do you reply to them etc...you can vote up or down individual emails to make them priority or non-priority.

Starred Emails - These are emails selected by the user as important.

Everything else. - This contains all your other emails that aren't spam such as newsletters that are considered non priority.

Google estimates that this will increase the average workers productivity by 6%.