Lets consider two scenarios.
1. You were on a vacation/ you were drunk and hungover too many days in a row/ you've been living at work or you were just acting anti-social. It's been a while since you checked your e-mail. It's a nightmare. You've friends inviting you to a party, your boss wondering what the hell you've been upto, Saudi princes offering you their fortune in return for a few thousand bucks, Pills promising to enhance your experience and her pleasure. You go through the pile, date-wise, not knowing if there's something that demands immediate attention.
2. Somehow you hit your 2 gig e-mail limit. Your communication with the outside world is blocked. You have 2 options - you clear your junk or end up a 100 bucks poorer every month. You decide to be cheap, and settle for the the 2 gig task of sifting through your e-mail and deleting what you don't need.
In both these scenarios, life will be simpler if you knew which e-mails demand the most attention, if your inbox had some way to intelligently estimate how important an e-mail is to you and present them to you in that other. Thinking about it, there's no real reason for your inbox to be sorted date-wise as it is done now (except that it's simple and obvious, and you assume the most recent e-mails are the ones you want to see first). It's more useful to sort e-mails by their estimated importance. That way, you first get to save your job, rsvp to your friend's party and chase after middle-east fortunes, in that order. Or delete prince's e-mail, your friend's e-mail and then your boss's, in that order.
Off the top of my head, here's a list of factors you can consider to judge if an e-mail matters more than the rest.
1. Using history/stats:
(a) Does the sender strike a chord? If you've been interacting (through e-mail or chat) with this person , then it's possibly because you have to do it (to get work done) or you enjoy it. In both cases, it's likely that the e-mail is important.
Post-reading ranking (ranking already read/checked e-mails) -
(b) The time you spent reading the e-mail. If the time-words ratio is high, you lingered over the e-mail long, which might indicate it said something important,
(c) If you've replied/forwarded the e-mail or not. If you have, you give a damn. So it's likely, it's important.
(d) How soon you reply to the e-mail. I reply to the most important e-mails the fastest.
2. Analyzing e-mail content: This can get tricky. This involves interpreting the text of the e-mail/ attachment and your reply to judge whether it's important. Is there a tone of urgency? Does it demand a reply by some soon-to-occur date? Does it contain topics that you've been texting/chatting/ e-mailing about a lot about recently?
Go g-mail (or anyone else). Take my 2 cents and make my life easier and lazier.
