Google is trying to come to the rescue with a new Gmail feature announced Tuesday called Priority Inbox, which monitors your messages and tries to organize your inbox based on a number of criteria, like how often you correspond with a particular sender.
Google explains that the first thing Priority Inbox does is split your inbox into three sections: "important and unread," "starred" and "everything else."
"Important" messages are judged to be the most significant, and sit at the top of your Gmail window. Next is the "starred" area, the messages you say are important. Finally, "everything else" includes those messages that can probably be dealt with later, or completely ignored -- the ones that aren't quite spam, but don't need to clutter up your screen or your brain right now.
Keith Coleman, Google's product management director, told Nytimes in an interview that Google has been working to solve the e-mail overload problem for the better part of a decade.
"Features like Priority Inbox were in the prerelease version of Gmail but were not ready for the public," Mr. Coleman said. "We finally figured out how to organize and categorize e-mail in a simple and intuitive way using three different criteria."
Surprisingly, Mr. Coleman said that one of the tools put to use in the new inbox organization is taken from the programming and algorithms used to categorize mail as spam. He said Gmail looks for terms and people that you categorize as important, or not, and decides whether those messages make it into your priority inbox accordingly.
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