In the full browser version of Gmail, the priority inbox is on top, followed by the items you have starred, and then finally the rest of your messages in a stream as usual, with most recent on top. While that might sound complicated, after testing it over the weekend, I’d be angry if I had to go back. The new feature went live at midnight ET.
The interface is less complicated than it sounds. Important and unread e-mails hold the top position, the most recent 10 e-mails you have starred to mark their importance sit in the center, and everything else not spam shows up in the bottom panel. The system is optional, and even when turned on, you can move to the “normal” inbox view by clicking on “inbox” in the left panel.”
Google has tested the feature internally and with thousands of regular users and companies that use Google Apps, according to Keith Coleman, Gmail’s product director.
“The main measure internally was that people were happier and got some e-mail sanity back,” Coleman said.
The feature is targeted at heavy e-mail users who get hundreds, if not thousands of e-mails, per day.
“When we launched Gmail the problem was spam versus non-spam,” Coleman said. “But the problem has evolved — now it’s the stuff in between that’s hard to manage.”
Coleman refers to messages such as deal offers, e-mail lists, and updates from companies you’ve purchased from as “bologna,” — basically mail you don’t mind getting, but which gets in the way of your critical messages from co-workers, bosses, clients and friends.
“This is like a spam filter for the bologna,” Coleman said.
The feature will show up as a red link in the top right corner of Gmail for users this week,
including for Google Apps users (who often have to wait a long time for Gmail updates such as voice calling from the inbox). The mobile HTML5 website will let users sort by the “important” tag but won’t have the three-panel view. The Gmail Android app will soon be auto-updated to support the label, but won’t have the enhanced view — at least not yet, though Coleman says that a view of the most important messages is even more key for mobile users. IMAP and ActiveSync users will have e-mails with the important label, but the experience will be better with the native app or mobile web site, according to Coleman.
As for what inspired the feature, Coleman said that the pre-release of Gmail had a feature highlighting the most important items, but was dropped because it just wasn’t powerful enough. The Gmail team resurrected the effort 18 months ago, with better results.
The hard part, according to Coleman, was getting the interface right. They started with what they called the “Magic Inbox,” which only showed the most important messages, but that freaked people out — even when it was working perfectly, because people were concerned they were missing messages. Another version sorted the inbox not in reverse chronological but by importance. But that wasn’t popular, since people wanted a view of the stream to “be sure they saw everything.”
The final version looks not unlike a riff on one of the most popular Google Labs features: Multiple Inboxes. Like Priority Mailbox, it created horizontally stacked inboxes, and let users decide what rules populated each inbox (all, starred, from certain people, etc.) But unlike Priority Inbox, there was no magic algorithm that highlighted the most important e-mails.
As for the algorithm, it will get smarter over time just from you sending or receiving mail, but users who want it to learn quicker can train it using the buttons that mark an e-mail as important or not important. Like the spam filter, some of the rules are general, and some are specific to you, based on words in the e-mail, whether the sender is in your contacts and even what SMTP-server was used to send the e-mail.
Whatever the magic formula is, heavy e-mail users who are willing to deal with a bit of a cognitive change will find the system might just make their e-mail manageable again.
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