31 August 2010 | Author: L. Sutherland Head of Media Content

Gmail experiments with helping you sort the wheat from the chaff

Google has decided to experiment with a new Gmail feature designed to help you get your hands on priority emails first.

The Priority Inbox, which was announced on the Google Enterprise Blog on Monday, hopes to help the time-starved masses steal back a few precious minutes when checking their emails.

How does it work? The experimental feature will automatically sort your emails and highlight the ones it thinks are important. These will then be shifted to your Priority Inbox, leaving you free to concentrate on what it assumes are your main concerns.

Priority Inbox Beta works by splitting your inbox into three sections - Important and unread, Starred, and Everything else - and emails will be automatically categorised as they hit your inbox.

Gmail will use a number of factors to work out which emails it deems important enough to be a priority, including the people whose emails you always read and which ones you normally skip over. You'll also have the chance to manually set conversations as important or not.

Internal testing at Google found that the feature reduced the amount of time the average user spent on their emails was reduced by six per cent, which could add up to a hefty saving of your precious time. Touted as a way to reduce the chances of information overload, the idea behind the Priority system is that you'll be able to find the most important emails without having to set up a selection of pesky rules for yourself.

However, for the moment, you'll only have the chance to play around with the beta feature if you're a Google Apps user who has enabled beta programs.

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