I was ecstatic when I first heard about Gmail's new feature, Priority Inbox. I was then furious when my Gmail account didn't get the feature until almost a week after they started rolling it out.
After I did get it, I was disappointed. It seemed like it could be very useful for people dealing with very high volumes of email. In Priority Inbox, emails from important contacts go in the "Priority Inbox" that sits on top of your regular inbox, where and all other messages go. But I've already built my own system with a combination of filters and labels to assign different values for incoming mail. I've got filters that "star" emails from a handful of really important people, as do notices from my bank. My different newsletters, shopping notifications, and Facebook updates have their own labels.
Priority Inbox uses stars to indicate correspondence that needs a follow up, and I don't use them that way. I didn't like how the new system left starred messages at the top of your inbox. It if you don't have any unread, important messages, there's a big banner saying, "Woohoo! You've read all the important messages in your inbox." That instantly went in my top-ten-most-annoying-things-ever list. After a couple days of playing with the new set-up, I stopped using it. Until I noticed that you have a lot of power to customize how Priority Inbox works.
Right now I've got it set up so that if I don't have any "important" messages, my inbox looks just like it always did. If I get an important message (or a few) then the Priority Inbox kicks in. I used to have any work emails that went to my personal account (either emails from coworkers or emails forwarded from my work account) get a certain label. I wish I'd had Priority Inbox back then, because you can tweak your settings so that a particular label, like "Work," gets sent to what's basically an inbox within an inbox.
I'm still playing around with the settings, but I love it. I've seen a few gushing reviews for Priority Inbox, but I haven't seen any point out the customization that's possible. (Full disclosure: I have not made an exhaustive search for any and all review.) I just can't believe that I almost shelved a really powerful tool for taming my inbox.
