Priority Inbox can help save you time if you’re overwhelmed with the amount of email you get. It attempts to automatically identify your important incoming messages and separates them out from everything else. Gmail uses a variety of signals to prioritize your incoming messages, including who you’ve emailed and chatted with most and which keywords appear frequently in the messages you opened recently.When you click the Priority Inbox navigation link on the left-hand side of your mail, you’ll see messages grouped in three sections: Important and unread, Starred, and Everything else.
If Priority Inbox mistakes an email as important or doesn't flag one that’s important to you, you can teach it to make better selections. Just select the message in question, and click the “mark as important” or “mark as not important” button; they’re the buttons with plus and minus icons just to the left of the Move to and Labelsdrop-down menus.
The Priority Inbox segregates Gmail into three different categories: "Important and Unread", "Starred", and "Everything Else". Gmail automatically filters incoming e-mail into either "Important and Unread" or "Everything Else", while the middle category is populated by those messages that have been flagged for future reference.
The process of filtering messages into the "Important and Unread" folder is similar to the concept of spam filtering, but in reverse. Google has developed an algorithm for Gmail which predicts whether or not a message is important based on a variety of criteria. Contacts you frequently e-mail, and message threads that you typically open or reply to are assumed to be higher priority. The best part, though, is that messages can be flagged as important or marked as unimportant to help Priority Inbox learn and improve over time.
Posted in: How-To-Guide
