Gmail offered users yet another way to automatically sort their mail into manageable piles Wednesday with the launch of an experimental feature that moves ho-hum e-mails from daily-deal sites out of your inbox and puts labels on other less important e-mails.
The Smart Labels feature, which has to be turned on in the Labs section of a Gmail account, complements Google's recent attempt to sort e-mails by priority. Both Smart Labels and the wickedly useful Priority Inbox help heavy e-mail users see messages that are important. That feature divvies the inbox into a number of segments, putting "priority" e-mails at the top.
While much has been said about the death of e-mail in the age of social networking, many people still gets hundreds of e-mails a day and spend a lot of time trying to deal with the overload.
Smart Labels doesn't redo the inbox, and instead is mostly an algorithm that pins labels on e-mails. E-mails from listservs are labeled "Forums," while a short message such as an alert about your power bill being due gets the label "Notification." Neither are removed from the inbox. For those using the Priority inbox feature, that algorithm works separately, so that it's possible for a e-mail from a mailing list to still land in your priority inbox.
Bulk messages, by contrast, are automatically moved out of your inbox's river and put into their own holding tank. In our short test of the feature, these include daily deals, a message from Kayak about travel deals, Google's newsletter about AdWords, and press releases from both the Justice Department and the Sunlight Foundation.
The idea is that these are messages one gets to after dealing with more pressing matters, according to Gmail product manager Steve Crossan.
"Internally we have seen a lot of love for the feature," Crossan said. "It's been useful mostly on people's personal accounts internally, and we have been thinking about that use case more than corporate accounts."
The algorithm isn't perfect, but users can train it to get better by undoing mislabeled e-mail.
"We have tried to ensure that the mail that is in the inbox is the mail you really want to see," Crossan said. "We don't want to be skipping stuff out of inbox that people want to see."
Crossan also emphasized that those who turn on the feature have lots of options, including using the labels to move all the labeled images out of their inbox, or to leave all of them in the stream of messages.
