Google today released some information on how Gmail’s ‘Priority Inbox’ feature actually works.

For those not familiar – ‘Priotity Inbox’ aims to sort through your email, and put all the important stuff in its own special inbox. This means you can just read the good stuff – saving time and sanity.

It is interesting to learn how this tool works. Here is a concise overview:

• Firstly, Google has a large pool of email data which points to what email is good and what email is not so good. After billions of messages through Gmail, Google can get a pretty good idea of what email people want to read – and it can use this knowledge straight away so your email can be sorted immediately after switching the feature on.
• As you use the tool more and more it learns from your actions – what you delete, read, reply to and label. It refines its processes and becomes a beast of sorts.
• Priority Inbox ranks email based on Social Features (how much you interact with a sender – be it click, reply, label or otherwise)
• Priority Inbox ranks email based on Content Features (i.e the content of the message body, header, footer, subject line etc) If you have never opened an email with ‘Free Shipping’ in the subject line, odds are any future messages with a similar subject line will not make it into the Priority Inbox.
• Priority Inbox ranks email based on Threading (If a message is part of a thread/conversation, it is likely to be important)
• Priority Inbox ranks email based  on Labeling (If a user labels a message – this means it is uber important!)

Whilst these insights are all pretty obvious, it is nice to get a feel for how the system works. The Priority Inbox is a great feature – something I use loads – and PI gets it right most of the time!

Are you a Gmail user? And what do you think of Priority Inbox?

Jay