What Is Gmail’s Importance Marker?
In addition to filters that sort your Gmail inbox, you have two symbols next to every email: a star and a marker. The latter is a key part of Gmail’s so-called Google magic.
You can click the marker yourself to teach Gmail that a conversation is important to you, but you’ll also find some emails already marked as important, based on what Google has learned of your interests.
At the end of the day, all the importance marker does is try to flag up significant conversations, sparing you the effort of doing it yourself—which you can still do with the marker or star.
How Does the Importance Marker Work?
The technology behind the importance marker is not as simple as its purpose. As Google’s support page explains, Gmail takes many signals into account, such as:
What emails you mark, star, archive, or delete. What you open and reply to. Whom you email and how frequently. Keywords in emails you interact with most. Which of its automatically marked emails you unmark.
The more you use Gmail, the more it learns from your behavior patterns. Even creating labels for Gmail to automatically use on emails can be a source of information for Google magic.
Basically, it’s a form of machine learning, gradually putting together a profile of your activities on Gmail and using it to identify emails you should see.
If your preferences change, you can unmark flagged-up conversations automatically and adjust your movements on Gmail, so that the system can learn the new pattern and stop marking certain emails as important.
Experiment With Gmail’s Importance Marker
With Google’s magic on Gmail, importance marking is intuitive and useful. The algorithm can still make mistakes, but all you need to do to improve it is tweak your habits while working on your emails.
Considering how much you can do on Gmail, it would be interesting to see what exactly affects its importance markers. Try out different features that benefit your workflow and pay attention to how Google magic behaves.
