Today, I activated the new Gmail Priority Inbox which was made available when I logged in to my account yesterday. At first I was reluctant to activate the feature, for I'm pretty OCD when it comes to my inbox organization. I rarely have more than 10 messages at a time in my inbox. I have my own system of prioritization that keeps the current, important items in my inbox and everything else out of sight, only reachable via search. Unfortunately, that OCD kicked in at the thought of better organization. Figures.
It remains to be seen whether or not I will keep this feature activated. The one thing the Priority Inbox feature does to improve my inbox organization is to keep the most important messages, such as bill reminders, at the top of the message list. This prevents my most important and urgent messages from being sent down the list in the event I get a flood of e-mail, which happens from time to time. For me, that's the only reason to keep the Priority Inbox feature.
I can see this feature being much more useful for someone who has a lot of messages in his or her inbox. It can also be very useful for those users who get spam that finds its way around Google's built-in spam-blocking feature. The Priority Inbox will detect those messages and put them at the bottom of the inbox, keeping the other messages it thinks as more important higher in the list. Priority Inbox is also good for filtering out mailing lists from the more personal messages.
I'll keep Priority Inbox active for a while longer and see if it's a feature I can really use. Right now I'm indifferent on the feature's usefulness for me, but I can say it's at least worth trying.
