25) Three New Tricks for Gmail’s Priority Inbox

Simulating Priority Inbox on a cellphone Two weeks ago, Google rolled out a new Gmail feature that sorts incoming mail — not the spam, but the stuff you actually want — into important and unimportant messages. The Priority Inbox is a super-inbox that, based on your own past behavior with e-mail, places what it calls “important and unread” messages at the top of the list. For example, it could flag a shipping notice that contains a FedEx tracking number from an online retailer as important, while pushing the same merchant’s weekly newsletter down into the less-important section. Other e-mail services, such as Microsoft’s Hotmail, have their own clutter-clearing tools, but Priority Inbox is the latest thing. Even the Googlers who built Priority Inbox have been learning new tips and tricks for it. I worked with the Priority Inbox team to come up with these three. Hide your Inbox Having Priority Inbox and Inbox side by side on your Gmail interface is distracting. The trusting thing to do is to live in Priority Inbox, which still lists all your non-spam messages as they come in. Drag the Inbox links into Gmail’s “More” labels section. That hides it. You can always get back to it if you need it, but if you spend a couple of clicks per day training Priority Inbox, you won’t miss the jumble of the old Inbox. Show only the important messages If you get behind on mail, say after a vacation, don’t try to look at Priority Inbox’s complete list of all your messages. Instead, move your cursor to the “Important and unread” section of the page, and click the View All link at the far right of the screen. This is also an act of trust, but if you’ve trained it, Priority Inbox will show you the messages you really need to read, without the daunting list of everything else. This is the whole point of Priority Inbox — to let you ignore the messages you don’t need to read and act upon right now. See Priority Inbox on your cellphone Priority Inbox doesn’t appear yet on the mobile phone version of Gmail. But Victoria Katsarou, a Google spokeswoman, told me that on most mobile phones with a browser, you should be able to login to Gmail and type this query into Gmail’s search box: is:important in:inbox is:unread. Bookmark the results page. That will create a shortcut you can use to quickly check your mail for family emergencies and urgent messages from your phone. Click Here For 5 More

15) Google Brings Voice Calling To Gmail

Google announced yesterday, it is adding VoIP calling to Gmail for U.S. users. Desktop calls to any phone in the U.S. and Canada will be free at least until the end of the year, and international calls will be billed at rates as low as two cents a minute. Using a combination of Google voice and video chat, this new phone calling feature from Gmail will let users dial numbers right from its web interface and talk to their contacts using headphone-mic. However, Google Voice isn’t coming to Google Talk, at least for now, because the focus was on the web integration. SMS is available in Gmail as a Labs feature, but isn’t part of this integration. It’s not rolling out in Google Apps today, but it will in the near future. It’s not clear if Google Voice will be changing, or whether this new service is a completely separate offering. The user interfaces appear the same—for example, the same icons are used to label missed calls or placed calls — but Google Voice is not a VoIP service. Users of the new chat/phone call service aren’t required to have a Google Voice account, and calls placed to U.S. or Canadian numbers will be free, with discounts on international calls as compared to standard rates. To get this new feature working, you’ll need to download install Voice and Video plug-in. Free calling is available for U.S. nationals to the U.S. and Canada for the rest of the year at least. Users based in U.S. can make calls to the U.K., France, Germany, China, Japan and many more countries at very low rates like $0.06/per minute (Rs. 2.80 approx.) right from their Gmail interface.