Google Overhauls Gmail to Take On E-Mail Overload
On Wednesday, Google introduced a new in-box design for its e-mail service, Gmail.
In a blog post announcing the new design, the company said it wanted to help people quickly sort through their messages to determine which ones were important and which ones could wait until later.
The revamped Gmail automatically sorts incoming messages into categories, which appear as three tabs — primary, social and promotions — that users can toggle between in their in-box. The primary tab contains the e-mails that the service thinks are most important. Social contains message updates from various social networks, like LinkedIn, Tumblr and Yelp. Promotions contains newsletters, party invites and concert announcements. Users can also select to add additional tabs to help manage electronic bills, banking statements and messages from forum boards.
“We get a lot of different types of e-mail: messages from friends, social notifications, deals and offers, confirmations and receipts, and more,” wrote Itamar Gilad, a product manager at Google, in the post. “All of these e-mails can compete for our attention and make it harder to focus on the things we need to get done.”
Mr. Gilad said Google’s new in-box is “organized in a way that lets you see what’s new at a glance and decide which e-mails you want to read when.”
The new in-box will begin rolling out for the desktop first, and eventually be available on mobile and tablet applications.
