The importance filter for your email Gmail

If you’re anything like the us here at TNW, you’re bogged down by email. Heck, we all are. In fact, people celebrate an empty inbox as if it were a national holiday. Given the staggering amount of Gmail users in the world, Google has had an opportunity to get really in touch with what you read, what you don’t, what’s important and what’s not.

Taking that information, Gmail has a new feature called Priority Inbox.

The idea is that, as you open your Gmail, it will be tagged and sorted by importance so that you’ll be able to more easily see what needs attention and what can wait until later…sometimes much later. Best of all, if Gmail happens to make an incorrect prediction, you can manually adjust the system as easily as you would add a star or delete a message

Message importance is decided using the same sort of algorithm that drives Gmail’s infamous spam protection. With that in mind, I absolutely can not wait to get this into my Google Apps inbox for The Next Web.

According to the Gmail Blog, we’ll start seeing Priority Inbox rolling out to users over the next few days, including Google Apps users who should see it within a week. Like all new Gmail features, you’ll see the large red text up near your Settings and Labs links at the top right of your Gmail. Once you have it, your inbox will be broken into 3 sections:

The top section holds your important messages, while the new middle section will display your starred items. Maybe they’re not immediately important, but they will be soon? Put a star on them to keep them easily in mind. The bottom section, finally, displays all of the rest of your email.

Individual messages, then, can be given higher or lower priority by selecting them then using the + or – buttons on your bar. Google also suggests setting up filters for your “must-have” email, as filters will now support an “Always mark it as important” option.

Overall, I can tell you that in the few minutes that I’ve had to use Priority Inbox, the results have been outstanding. Not that you should be surprised. If you’re a Gmail user, then spam generally isn’t something you have to deal with. Now, because of that same type of algorithm, wasting time on unwanted mail should soon be a thing of the past as well.

Gmail updates. Better management, more control, UI improvements abound.

A couple of weeks ago, a little plugin for Gmail tickled our fancy so we thought we’d pass it along. Boomerang, we said, would let you “send email later or receive it when you want”. Little did we know how many of you wanted this function.

Baydin, the company behind Boomerang, saw an absolutely overwhelming response to the Boomerang rollout. Servers were crippled, gates were crashed and a product launch went down in TNW history.

In the two weeks since then, Baydin has been hard at work to implement some features that you’ve asked for since the original launch. Today, with Boomerang 0.5, those features are yours for the taking:

• Scheduled message management
• Customizable behavior
• UI Improvements
• Random Return Times

The biggest thing is probably the scheduled message management. Here’s what Baydin has to say:

Dozens of you asked us, “How can I see all the messages I have scheduled to return or send later?” We’ve added a new page that lets you see when your messages are set to return and be sent, reschedule or edit them, and cancel the scheduled action.

• See all the messages you have scheduled for return and for sending
• Reschedule when a message should be sent/returned
• Cancel sending/returning a message
• Edit a message you have scheduled to be sent
• Send/return a message immediately
• Set your preferences

Beyond the management screens, Boomerang looks better and acts better than ever before. A full run-down of all of the improvements can be found on the Baydin blog.

Here’s the part you’ve been wanting to know about. Last time, we had 250 Boomerang invite codes and that simply wasn’t enough. This time, we’re told that the following code will open up the Boomerang world to unlimited users, so here you go:

Hop in, get downloading and let us know what you think. The team from Baydin is amazing, so please do give them feedback as well.