(CNN) -- Last week's rumor was the real deal: Google is rolling ou
t a new Gmail inbox today which autosorts incoming messages so important stuff is easy to find and clutter stays out of the way.
Wait: doesn't Gmail's
Priority Inbox do that? Well, yes.
But the new inbox (which
you can choose to use if you're not using Priority Inbox) is a different
take on the same general concept. Instead of attempting to figure out
which messages matter most to you and then promoting them to the top of
your inbox, the new one sticks tabs across the top — up to five of them,
for "Primary" messages (basically, ones from real people, plus anything
else you haven't chosen to weed out), Social (stuff like Facebook and
Twitter updates),
Promotions (ads), Updates
(bills, notifications, etc.) and Forums (mailing lists and the like).
Each tab indicates how many unread messages you've got in that category,
so you can monitor incoming messages even if they don't pop up on your
current tab.
Conceptually, this is
simpler than Priority Inbox, since Gmail is only trying to sort messages
into general categories rather than figure out which people are more
important to you than others. (I've been using the new version for a few
days, and the sorting seems to work really well).
And you need to
proactively click around to other tabs to see less-important messages,
so the Primary tab feels more streamlined than Priority Inbox's
stacked-inboxes approach (the latter feels a tad cluttered, at least to
me).
Bottom line: the new
inbox is an interesting option for folks who haven't warmed to Priority
Inbox. Like, for instance, me — I admire Priority, but tend to use it
for a bit, then turn it off, then try it again.
The new inbox is rolling
out to users over the coming weeks; it'll also be available in Gmail's
Android and iOS apps. It's good to see a major new Gmail feature debut
in both old-school and mobile Gmail at the same time — and for a while,
at least, this is going to be the Gmail inbox I'll use.
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