It’s been one week since I started using Gmail’s Priority Inbox, so I though I’d summarize my experience with an email review. For those of you who haven’t heard about this handy little tool yet, the idea is that Gmail sets up “priority inbox” for important messages and sends the rest to your regular mailbox. Although I’ve been marking tons of emails as important (or not), Priority Inbox is still getting a sense of my email priorities and yes, still marking some of my daily emails as important despite my marking them as not important.
However, as I recently discovered, you can fast track this process by creating filters. So, for each of my regular clients, I can set up a filter and instruct Gmail to make all of their emails as important (since client emails rank a whole lot higher than, say, newsletters or press releases). It’s a bit more work than simply marking something as important or not important, but it ensures that all of those emails make it to my priority inbox.
In case you need a quick tutorial, here’s how to set up a filter:
1. Click the “create a filter” link in the upper right corner.
2. Fill in the email address of the sender whose messages you’d like to be marked as important (or you choose other criteria like subject line or keywords).
3. Check the box for “always mark it as important” (or choose another action like starring it, forwarding it, deleting it, etc.)
4. Hit “create filter” and you’re done!
Another neat little trick I discovered (courtesy of Gmail’s blog) is that instead of clicking the buttons for important or not important, you can select a message (or multiple messages) and hit “+” or “-” to indicate importance.
Unlike other email tools I’ve tested, Priority Inbox really relies on you putting in the time to train it properly and customize it for your needs. Services like Boomerang serve a much different function but don’t require as much of a learning curve before you start seeing results. Although I find Priority Inbox to be useful, it hasn’t drastically changed how I manage emails.
What about you? Any thoughts on Priority Inbox?
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