GMail introduces the “Priority Inbox”

For most people who use email it is clear that even the spam filters are not enough to ensure that you get the most relevant email. GMail’s spam filter works very well, perhaps better than any other, however that won’t stop your important email from getting lost amongst tons of newsletters, updates and offers which you yourself subscribed to.

Ever faced this scenario? You check your inbox, only to find dozens of unread emails. You scan through them and decide to archive them all rather than read them. Unfortunately, in the process you archive a rather important email.

GMail’s new “Priority Inbox” aims to tackle that problem. GMail will learn over time which emails you open, read and reply to, and accordingly automatically sort your email to display relevant, important emails first. Email is then put into different sections, important unread email, starred email and everything else after that — these sections can be customized.Just like GMail’s spam system, this too can be trained over time, by marking an email as less or more important.

This reminds us of Mozilla Messaging’s Raindrop project which had a similar noble goal. While GMail will obviously provide these features in their web interface, Mozilla Messaging’s Raindrop is a mail client application — although it runs its own server and has to be accessed via a browser — which can aggregate details from multiple social networks to figure out which email is more important to you.

This feature will be rolled out over a week for both GMail and Google Apps mail users, so keep and eye out. You can try “Priority Inbox” by visiting it’s new home at Google.

Check out Google’s video explaining their newest feature: