Wouldn’t it be great if your email provider or the email software you’re using could sort all the emails you get into what’s prioritized and what’s not so important? You can’t really trust that people use the high importance exclamation mark correctly on emails any more since some people tend to use this on all emails they send. So how do you do it then?
Google have the solution for everyone using Gmail. By training Gmail what you think is important and not Gmail can sort the emails into different categories depending on how important they really are. The priority Inbox is divided into three categories: Important and unread, Starred, and Everything else.
So if you have hundreds of unread emails and you lets say only have five minutes to check out the most important once, then you just look in your Priority Inbox and check the Important and unread emails. Later when you have more time you can focus on the Everything else category where all your other emails end up. You can of course also star emails you need to return to at a later time or if the mail contains important information you need to find in an easy way later.
This is how it could look in your inbox:
Important emails get a yellow arrow and are found in the Important and unread category until you’ve read them. After that you can find the emails in the Everything else category.
I think this is really brilliant by Google and I think that everyone else providing email services (like Hotmail and Yahoo for example) need to follow this. One downside so far is that this is only available for people using gmail.com as their email address. If you use your own domain name I could find the option of activating this, but I guess that’s just a matter of time before they roll out this feature to everyone because companies (mostly using their own domain instead of gmail.com) will have more use for a feature like this then private persons just using email to stay in contact with friends and family.
