Gmail Smart Labels Automatically Filter Less Important Email

Gmail today is launching a feature called Smart Labels that automatically categorizes bulk (aka newsletters), notification and forum (aka group mailing list) emails and in some cases moves them out of the main inbox. This idea of automatic sub-inboxes isn’t new; it’s actually something that Facebook Messages does too–separate personal email from mass email. Smart Labels adds to the company’s widely deployed Priority Inbox sorting tool. The feature could have interesting implications for the notification emails from social Web and daily sites that flood many of our inboxes, giving them less prominence than they have now. But Smart Labels aren’t a default, they’re a Gmail Labs feature that users have to turn on manually.