Yesterday the Twitter was awash with messages about this revolutionary new Gmail Priority Inbox. The beta version just arrived in my email, and have to say that I am already in love with it. Essentially what it does is bring new, unopened, important messages to the top, then lists those messages that are "starred" (which I have flagged with a star), and then lists everything else. It learns which are important messages over time depending on which are opened and which are responded to. In other words, its accuracy gets better over time.
This entertaining little video explains it a bit better:
Now my little rant: many people see gmail.com as an unprofessional email domain, and it is even blocked by some organizations' email systems. When I left the law firm life (and Outlook), I found Gmail to be my best email client. Even when I use my professional email domain from crosbygroup.ca, I still use the Gmail client to manage my email. It has features that allow me to manage and organize messages quite nicely. And they really think about users when they create new features. With some of these new features (Priority Inbox, Gmail call phone) I don't think discounting Gmail as "unprofessional" will hold water very much longer.
I completely agree. We use Google Apps, which means there will be a good lag before I will test priority inbox, but I'm a huge fan of Google web mail generally.
Perhaps of interest… I just counted & have no less than 66 filters protecting my inbox; routing those routine but less important emails into sub-folders, and adding colour coded tags for incoming client messages, etc.
I've invested a lot into customizing the environment, but feel like G. Apps & Gmail have a lot to offer professionals & small businesses.
I am much the same, and have been largely happy with the way these filters, etc. have worked. This new feature really pushed it to a whole other level!