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thatthatis

Why do we still have forced ordering by arrival time?

When I sort my physical mail, I put it into piles and order those piles by importance. When I sort my email, I can't.

In my physical mail I can choose the importance order and ad to the queues as I wish. With email, not so much.

I want a gmail plugin that lets me order my inbox in order of priority.

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> When I sort my physical mail, I put it into piles and order those piles by importance. When I sort my email, I can't.

That's almost entirely a comment on how lousy the state of modern email clients is.

Outlook has let you do this for years, you can set various flags on mail items, you can also do this for mail you send so that it will automatically flag for the recipient.

The problem of course is that if you allow the sender to specify the importance of an email they will flag things that are important to them,not necessarily important to you.

Fortunately, Outlook also allows you to set up processing rules that reset the priority of an incoming e-mail. No need to let senders specify priority for you.

Gmail has a feature called priority inbox -- it does almost exactly what you want. Within the priority section it is still sorted by time, not by priority.

I've always wanted an inbox that sorted purely on priority.

Unfortunately, gmail marks everything (well, 99%) as "priority" despite my training it for many months.

Interesting. It's actually almost flawless for me. Have you done bulk training? Do searches for groups of messages you know are and are not priority and mark them in bulk. This seems to have helped me immensely.

I have, it doesn't seem to help much if at all. I'm not entirely sad, I already tag my emails by contact group and what vhost/catchall they show up at.

Strangely, it works fine in my non-GApps email.

gmail looks like to be on this path already except instead of allowing you to queue messages its trying algos to manage it for you. (Priority inbox / email tabs)

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