Google prioritises email

INTERNET SEARCH OUTFIT Google has come up with some natty software that will put important emails at the top of your inbox while the spam and people wanting you to join their latest Facebook group will sink to the bottom.

Last night Google released Priority Inbox for Gmail, a new feature for managing massive amounts of email.

According to Google, Priority Inbox uses information such as keywords, the people that a user emails the most and the user's email habits to select the most pressing emails in the user's inbox. Those emails are brought to the top of the user's Gmail and marked as important so the user can deal with them first.

The software separates new emails as 'Important and unread' at the top, followed by 'starred', which have been previously stamped with a star and 'everything else' at the bottom.

Gmail product director Keith Coleman said that inboxes were getting filled with hundreds of emails daily, but only a few of them require users' immediate attention. Even with dozens of Gmail filters, important messages often get lost in the pile, leading to lost opportunities or missed meetings.

He claimed that important messages will bubble to the top, while emails that still require attention can sit in the Starred section until they're addressed.

Apparently it works using one of those magical Google algorithm thingees for cherry picking the threads that require your attention. µ