Google rolls out Smart Labels for Gmail

Google has introduced a new Gmail Labs feature called Smart Labels, which is intended to help with inbox management.

The setting — which is still in testing and can be enabled in the Gmail Labs settings — will categorise incoming mail as 'Bulk,' 'Notifications' or 'Forums', Google said on Wednesday.

Under the option, mass mailings and newsletters will be classified as Bulk and will be automatically filtered out of the inbox. Account statements, receipts and other mail addressed directly at a user will be classified as Notifications and email from group mailing lists gets tagged as Forums.

"Gmail's filters and labels were invented to help manage the deluge, but while I have about 100 filters that triage and label my incoming mail, most of my friends and family have all their messages in a giant unfiltered inbox," Stanley Chen, a software engineer at Gmail, wrote on the company's blog.

The Smart Labels will work alongside existing filters and settings and allow the user to change the categorisation settings. It also allows a user to specify whether mail filtered by the Smart Labels option should skip the inbox or not.

In August, Google introduced an automatic feature — called Priority Inbox — that doesn't rely on user-defined filtering rules in order to filter emails into one of three categories: namely, 'important and unread', 'starred', and 'everything else'. In February, Google began extending the feature to users that had not explicitly enabled it in the Labs settings.