Gmail 101: How to Use Priority Inbox to Automatically Filter Out Clutter

By Jon Knight

For many of us, getting to inbox zero is the highlight of our day. But if you used your email address to sign up for various sites and services, your inbox is probably cluttered with all sorts of spam, news letters, and unimportant emails. Thankfully, Gmail has a feature that can solve this by using machine learning.

Gmail’s Priority Inbox analyzes your usage to improve your workflow. When enabled, Gmail will automatically determine which emails you’re likely to care about. The important ones are placed in the Priority Inbox, where you’ll receive notifications for unread messages. The remaining emails are left in a general inbox and aren’t synced with your mobile device, so you can deal with them later.

Step 1: Enable Priority Inbox

To start, open Gmail and select the hamburger menu in the upper-left corner. Choose “Settings,” then select your email address. Under the General grouping, choose “Inbox Type,” then select “Priority Inbox.” Return to your inbox and select the hamburger menu to see the new tabs. The Primary, Social, and Promotions tabs will be replaced with just two tabs: Priority Inbox and Inbox.

Step 2: Learn How Priority Inbox Works

Gmail determines which emails to place in Priority Inbox by analyzing how you interact with your inbox. Important factors are the people you email and how often you send messages to them, which emails you previously opened, who you reply to, keywords found within emails you commonly open, and which emails you’ve starred (versus which are archived or deleted).

As you may have already noticed, Priority Inbox isn’t perfect. Sometimes, these events don’t perfectly align with your needs. Gmail’s machine learning improves over time, but you can also take active steps to make sure the only emails found in your inbox are ones you care to open.

Since Gmail uses markers to label email as important, by manually labeling emails that didn’t show up in your Priority Inbox, Gmail will learn to add those emails later on. The opposite is also true — marking messages as not important will help Gmail learn that it shouldn’t alert you about them in the future.

Step 3: Improve Priority Inbox’s Accuracy

Select the hamburger menu in the upper-left corner of your screen and choose “Inbox.” Open an email you want to add to your priority inbox, tap the three-dot menu button in the top-right corner (next to the envelope icon), then choose “Mark important.” This will add the email to your Priority Inbox, and Gmail will learn to value this type of message. Therefore, any new email related to this one will also be added to your Priority Inbox.

To unmark an email, head to the Priority Inbox and choose the email you wish to remove. Select the three-dot menu button in the upper-right corner and choose “Mark not important” to downgrade the importance of this type of email. The email will move out of the Priority Inbox, and any new emails related to this one will be marked as not important and sent to your regular inbox.

Priority Inbox isn’t perfect, but with time and adjustment, it can be a vital tool that helps you achieve inbox zero in a matter of minutes. According to Google in 2011, 13% less time is spent reading unimportant emails when using Priority Inbox. Although this isn’t a huge number, Google has made leaps and bounds in AI and machine learning since then, so this number should be significantly greater now.

Originally published at smartphones.gadgethacks.com on November 28, 2017.