Gmail's Priority Inbox hopes to solve your email overload (automatically)

The Gmail enhancements continue to come fast and furious. Shortly after unveiling Gmail voice calling, Google has now released a feature designed to manage your email "bacn" (not spam). It's called Priority Inbox.

Google has dubbed email that isn't junk mail (like spam is) but isn't all that important "balogna," although there's already that existing bacn term. Many users, including us, have used Gmail's filters to route these different less important, sometimes subscribed-to mailing list emails to diffenent folders, to track them that way. Gmail Priority Inbox is supposed to automate that.

Here's how it works: your inbox will be divided into three sections. These will be : “Important and unread,” “Starred” and “Everything else,” from top to bottom, by default. Essentially, these will be high to low priority in order.

Using past behavior and other signals, including those you email most and other messages you reply to, among others, Gmail Priority Inbox will organize your email into those buckets. Of course, it will have to learn, and you can help that by categorizing emails yourself with the + and - buttons that will appear at the top of your inbox when the feature is enabled.

You can also filters to mark certain things important or unimportant (of course, you could already use filters and labels to categorize things). You can also rearrange and customize the three inbox sections.

Obviously, there will be a learning curve involved, for both users and Gmail. The feature will show up in your Gmail gradually, as do all these cloud-based service updates. You'll be alerted when you "New! Priority Inbox" link in the top right corner of your Gmail account (or the new Priority Inbox tab in Gmail Settings).

Note that we have noticed with Gmail updates that usually you must logout / login again to see the new functionality (meaning if you are like some of us, and never logout or reboot your PC, you'll have to manually do so, against your normal behavior).

Watch a video of the new feature here.

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