GMail’s Priority Inbox: It’s Really Not that Cool
September 5, 2010I’ll preface this with saying that it might just be me thinking this, but Gmail’s Priority Inbox that was recently released is something that just isn’t that cool.
CRN’s article, currently one of the top hits on Google gives these three reasons that it’s a game-changer:
- It sorts Gmail for you.
- Users can also set filters.
- Users have to wade through less junk.
First of all, #2 and #3 were already there.
I use filters all the time for emails I want to keep, but don’t necessarily want to read, to do things like mark them as read, give them a label and archive them. Newegg’s daily deal emails are a good example of this. I want to get them, but I don’t want to see them every day, I just want to peruse them from time to time. Filters have been there as long as I can remember, they’re nothing new for the priority inbox.
As for junk email – that was one of the greatest thing switching to Gmail got users from the start: an amazing spam filter. It’s so well done that when spam gets through, I usually end up opening the email because I never expect anything to get through. How did priority inbox change that?
Finally, and this is might be my biggest issue, is that it makes Gmail more cluttered. Gmail is great for it’s power while being so simple. It’s the same reason I don’t understand multiple inboxes. I would consider myself a heavy email user, but it’s really not that hard to quickly go through and just handle the emails as they come in so they never get to the point where I need something to sort it for me. I don’t need to add clutter in order for Gmail to try and figure out what’s important for me. I can tell within a second if an email is important.
I’m a huge Google fan and I do think it’s a rare occurrence when they get something wrong, but here I think that this is a pretty useless feature. In fact, I wanted to immediately disable it, but because I’m a Google fan, I had to give it a fair shake. But, when every Facebook notification was coming through as important, but a payment from Paypal wasn’t, I had had it.
Sure, I could spend time customizing priorities, but I know at a glance what’s important, and what is important is constantly changing to the point it would take me more time to go through and customize important emails than it would be just to handle them the way I have been. I’m not going to drink the kool-aid on this one, Gmail’s Priority Inbox is just not useful.
