Google has devised a great new way to organize your email: Google inspects your stuff and decides what is important to you.
Privacy advocates: This may actually be a good thing.
It is called Gmail Priority Index, and if you’re one of over 100 million users of Google’s email service, you may already be soaking in it. The service, in which Google’s computers watch your email habits and rank your most important emails, was scheduled to roll out at midnight, Eastern Standard Time.
The service is not as creepy as it sounds. Google already scans the emails in Gmail – that is how it knows what ads to place on the right hand side of the screen (and that is what pays for the “free” service.) Priority Index is an opt-in service – you choose the Priority Inbox instead of the standard inbox — that uses similar techniques to put in the front of your email list the kinds of messages you tend to respond to quickly.
It also learns your habits over time, moving things in or out of the priority area, and will take user commands about whether or not an email is actually important. Email users mark with a star are kept in an area between priority and general mail, creating something like a “to do” list.