Priority Inbox and Revising your Existing Filters in Gmail

Gmail rolled out Priority Inbox last week and it’s pretty awesome. It’s like my much beloved Sort by Magic for Google Reader but for Gmail.

Priority Inbox learns from how you interact with your email, who are the real people you’re actually interacting with, which emails do you actually open, and which ones do you click through and uses that information to pull important emails to the top of your inbox.

For the past year or so, I’ve been using a mass of filters to try to keep non-priority emails out of my inbox entirely but I want to play with Priority Inbox and see how smart Gmail really is so I needed to edit my filtering system. Priority Inbox has an option to override filters but after 2 days, I could already tell that it didn’t actually do a good job of overriding filters at least the way I had mine set up.

In Gmail labs you can enable the ability to import and export your filters. Before you mess with your filters, back up your current setup and keep a clean copy of that back up (with that clean copy you don’t have to worry about messing up or breaking anything, you can always delete all your changes and reupload your old set up).

I decided I wanted to maintain all of my filters that label my emails but I wanted to dump and start fresh on my filters that either mark emails as read or have them skip the inbox so that I could really see the power of Priority Inbox.

Gmail does not have a good interface for searching or editing your existing filters but I discovered that I could open my filter export file in a basic text editor (TextEdit on a Mac, Notepad on a PC) and use a find and replace function (Edit menu then Find) to remove the lines of code that marked as read or skipped the inbox. To do this:

• locate one line of the code you want to remove
• copy and paste the entire line into the find field
• leave the replace field blank
• hit replace all
• repeat as necessary for any other types of filters you want to remove

Then I deleted all my filters in Gmail (make sure you keep that back up copy handy in case you want to go back to what you were doing before) and uploaded my edited filters file.

Now I can actually see how smart Priority Inbox is and how fast it learns.

To really make Priority Inbox a powerhouse, Gmail or Apple needs to work out an option so that only the items in my Priority Inbox show up in my iPhone inbox.

Related posts:
Using Labels and Filters in Gmail
Is Inbox Zero a Good Goal?
IMAP for Gmail and your Mac or iPhone

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