Google has just announced today that is will be rolling out
a new feature in Gmail that is aimed at helping users to organize their emails
and prevent email overload. The new
Gmail email client for the web as well as its iOS and Android counterpart will
soon have tabs that automatically categorize a user’s messages into different
categories.
By default, there will be 5 tabs on the new Gmail. These
include the Personal Tab which holds
all emails coming directly from a user’s contacts, the Social tab which aggregates email from various social networking
including Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus among others, the Promotions tab which contains emails
from commercial entities such as deals sites and brand newsletters, the Updates tab for bills, receipts and
similar messages and a Forums tab
which of course will house messages from forums, discussions or other networks where
the user is a member of.
Existing and incoming messages are sorted using Google’s machine
learning technology. But in case the system makes a mistake in putting an email
to the wrong folder, users can just drag the emails to the right folder after
which Gmail will ask the user if he wants to put such email in the said tab for
future instances. Users can also add or remove any tabs on the screen through a
menu but their order cannot be changed.
Google plans to roll out the update gradually so it might
take a while before everyone sees the new design. But for those who can’t wait,
Google might give users a switch to flip through the gear menu allowing them to
turn on the new feature manually. As for the iOS and Android version of Gmail,
the update is scheduled to roll out starting next week.
The iOS and Android version of the app will feature the same
tabbed interface but instead of having the tabs at the top of the page, mobile
app users will see them at the side drawer of the app and will have
corresponding colors and counters to differentiate them from each other.
Source: TechCrunch.com
