74 unread emails! Since last night? Are you kidding! We all know what email overload feels like, especially if we’ve been away on holiday or if our American cousins don’t realise that Bank Holidays are sacred. It’s hard enough working out what work has priority but even worse when client email are hidden within an inbox cluttered with newsletters, calendar reminders and “special offers”.
If you use Gmail you might be interested to know that Google are working on the problem.
Gmail is great at filtering out spam but today the Google gmail team announced that they will use similar technology to automatically sort your emails by importance.
While some may argue complain, once again, that the evil Google is interfering with our lives and meddling with our messages, you’ll be glad to know this is an opt-in service. And, like it’s brilliant spam controls, it appears to work in the background making intelligent guesses based on who is in your contacts list, who you reply to, and which emails you read.
As a technology writer and freelancer I get a lot of email, to a lot of accounts, and I subscribe to literally hundreds of newsletters, services and feeds that come into my inbox. I’ve activated Priority Inbox and now I see messages from clients at the top and newsletter, circulars, BACN and other “offers” below.
I’ve been a huge fan of Gmail for a long, long time — looking at my archives I can see I received my first Gmail in July 2004 and, not coincidently, I sent my last Hotmail that same week — and this new feature looks like it’ll help me manage my mail even more efficiently.
If you don’t use Gmail you’ve probably got very good reasons but if you do then you really need to check out the “Priority Inbox” feature from Google Labs — it’s being rolled out slowly over the next few months (only one of my 6 accounts have it enabled right now).
