Three New Tricks for Gmail’s Priority Inbox

Two weeks ago, Google introduced a  Gmail feature that sorts incoming mail — not the spam, but the stuff you actually want — into important and unimportant messages. The Priority Inbox is a super-inbox that, based on your own past behavior with e-mail, places what it calls “important and unread” messages at the top of the list. For example, it could flag a shipping notice that contains a FedEx tracking number from an online retailer as important, while pushing the same merchant’s weekly newsletter down into the less-important section.

Other e-mail services, such as Microsoft‘s Hotmail, have their own clutter-clearing tools, but Priority Inbox is the latest thing. Even the Googlers who built Priority Inbox have been learning new tips and tricks for it. I worked with the Priority Inbox team to come up with these three.

Hide your inbox

Having Priority Inbox and Inbox side by side on your Gmail interface is distracting. The trusting thing to do is to live in Priority Inbox, which still lists all your non-spam messages as they come in. Drag the Inbox links into Gmail’s “More” labels section. That hides it. You can always get back to it if you need it, but if you spend a couple of clicks per day training Priority Inbox, you won’t miss the jumble of the old Inbox.

Show only the important messages

If you get behind on mail, say after a vacation, don’t try to look at Priority Inbox’s complete list of all your messages. Instead, move your cursor to the “Important and unread” section of the page, and click the View All link at the far right of the screen. This is also an act of trust, but if you’ve trained it, Priority Inbox will show you the messages you really need to read, without the daunting list of everything else. This is the whole point of Priority Inbox — to let you ignore the messages you don’t need to read and act upon right now.

See Priority Inbox on your cellphone

Priority Inbox doesn’t appear yet on the mobile phone version of Gmail. But Victoria Katsarou, a Google spokeswoman, told me that on most mobile phones with a browser, you should be able to login to Gmail and type this query into Gmail’s search box: is:important in:inbox is:unread. Bookmark the results page. That will create a shortcut you can use to quickly check your mail for family emergencies and urgent messages from your phone.

Want more? Google has posted an additional five tips on the company’s official Gmail blog.