Google rolls out email sorting for webmail users

Google plans to begin rolling out to Gmail users on Tuesday a new feature designed to automatically rearrange messages in their inbox so that the most important and pressing ones appear at the top. Called Priority Inbox, the feature will be released with the beta, or test, label and is being described for now as "experimental" by the company.

All individual Gmail users will gain access to it in the coming days. Availability for people who use it as part of Google Apps will depend on whether domain administrators allow their users to activate "pre-release" features. The motivation behind Priority Inbox is Google's conviction that the problem of email overload continues getting worse, forcing people to spend much time and effort managing their inbox both for personal and work-related matters.

Priority Inbox is an additional, optional view of inbox messages. People who choose it can toggle back to other more conventional views, such as listing messages chronologically by arrival timestamp or alphabetically by the senders' names or subject lines. With Priority Inbox activated, Gmail divides the inbox into three sections: the top one contains the most important and unread messages, the middle one has messages that have been flagged by users with a star to highlight them, and the last section has all other messages.

Matthew Glotzbach, director of product management in Google's Enterprise unit, sees Priority Inbox as a sort of inverted spam filter which, instead of blocking and setting aside unsolicited messages, prioritises items in the inbox so that users can attend more quickly to the most important emails.

"If you're in meetings and you come back to your email and you have five minutes between appointments and you have 50 emails, which five messages do you spend your time on in that window of time?" Glotzbach said. Priority Inbox aims to automate that and simplify that decision, he said.

The algorithmic calculation that Gmail uses to assign priority includes a variety of parameters, including the frequency with which the user exchanges messages with different senders, the messages that get read and replied to, or conversely, ignored, and manual indications from users ranking messages as more or less important.

Google provides a variety of options for users to manually customise Priority Inbox settings and preferences if they so choose.

Internal tests at Google showed that people who used Priority Inbox spent on average 6 percent less time managing email, or an entire work-week per year in the case of an employee who normally spends 13 hours per week on email. "We see this as an ongoing evolution of the focus of Gmail, which has always been around addressing this problem of information overload," Glotzbach said.

Existing Gmail features intended to address this problem include the product's conversation view, which groups together email threads, the search feature, which indexes messages' full text and its antispam technology.