Tech Tuesday Tip

Tech Tips for the non-techie:

Last week I was watching as the news broke about how Gmail was going to release a new Priority Inbox feature.

(Gmail is the free, almost never ending, email service that Google provides.)

I have a Gmail account, but I also have a Google Apps Account that I use to manage most of my ScLoHo Marketing Solutions business with. Friday, my Google Apps Gmail account gave me the option of adding the priority feature.

Of course I said yes, and here's the email they sent me:

Priority Inbox^Beta

Welcome to Priority Inbox! By automatically separating out your most important messages, Priority Inbox makes it easy for you to read and respond to the messages that matter.

Get through your email faster

Try reading and replying to the messages in the "Important and Unread" section first. Mark anything that requires follow-up with a star, then go through the "Everything Else" section. If you leave Priority Inbox, you can return to it by clicking the link next to Inbox on the side navigation of Gmail. How it works Gmail's servers look at several types of information to identify the email that's important to you, including who you email and chat with most, how often you email with these people, and which keywords appear frequently in the emails you read.

Train Priority Inbox

If Priority Inbox makes a mistake, you can use the buttons to correctly mark a conversation as important or not important, and Priority Inbox will quickly learn what you care about most.

And more...

• Customize Priority Inbox: You can change what type of email you see in each section (like switching the "Important and Unread" section to just "Important"). Just click on the section headers or visit the Priority Inbox tab under Settings and choose to "customize inbox groups."
• Use filters to guarantee importance: If you want to be absolutely sure that some messages are always marked as important (like email from your boss), you can set up a filter and choose "Always mark it as important."
• Search by importance: If you want to see all the messages that have been marked as important, both read and unread, do a Gmail search for "is:important."
• Switching back to your old inbox: If Priority Inbox isn't for you, you can easily switch back to your normal inbox by clicking "Inbox" on the left or hide Priority Inbox altogether from Gmail Settings.

To learn more about managing your email with Priority Inbox, check out the Gmail Help Center.

- The Gmail Team

Google, Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043 USA

For quite awhile, I've been urging friends and family to switch to Gmail. I switched from Yahoo and Hotmail to Gmail due to Gmail's spam filtering was so far superior. I now recieve about 300 spam messages a day and over the course of a week, maybe one or two (out of 2000) aren't caught by Gmail.

For the past 8 years, I've worked for a group of radio stations in Fort Wayne, Indiana and have used Microsoft Outlook to manage that particular email account.

Well a couple of years ago, I set up my Gmail so my radio station email would also show up in my Gmail account. This gives me multiple ways to check, respond and organize email, which is still a necessity these days.