You know the feeling: opening up your e-mail to find hundreds of messages of varying importance. Some are automated reminders from your favorite sites, some are newsletters you have subscribed to, some are actually from real people trying to contact you, and so on. Separating the wheat from the chaff can be overwhelming much of the time, and even the most carefully crafted filters don't keep up with the ever-changing nature of what's important to you.

Google is hoping to address that problem with a new feature in Gmail called Priority Inbox. Aimed at providing users a way to get through their inboxes as efficiently as possible, Priority Inbox tries to learn your e-mail habits in order to decide which messages are important to you, and move them up to the top where you can see them first.

Gmail looks at the sender and actions you've taken on similar messages in order to decide what to elevate and what to leave alone. (Do you star them? Get rid of them immediately? Reply to them?) Like many spam systems, you can help teach Priority Inbox by telling it which messages are important and which ones aren't.

"We think we can get this to be pretty solid out of the box, but it gets better and better over time. It essentially learns from you," Google's group product manager of Enterprise Apps Rajen Sheth told Ars. "This is just the next evolution in making people more efficient in dealing with information overload."

Google has already been testing Priority Inbox with business and consumer Gmail users for several months—Sheth says he "can't live without it" after using it himself for several months—and claims that people are spending an average of 6 percent less time managing their e-mail after enabling the feature. "That's clearly a significant productivity gain," Sheth told Ars, as it adds up to one full workweek's worth of time per year. More importantly (at least to people like me who stress constantly about e-mail), it helps bring organization to chaos and draws your attention to things that need addressing.

How is this different from setting up a complex set of filters, though? Sheth pointed out that Priority Inbox is more dynamic than anything you could put into a filter, as what's important to you could change over time. "You might look into different subjects, or interact with different people. It also factors in things that change rapidly, such as how quickly you reply to certain messages or how you apply stars," Sheth said. "Mostly though, it's just a lot simpler. My own experience in setting up a filter like that is that it's something I have to think carefully about and keep iterating on. This is useful for users right away as something they can easily tune without knowing how to create filters."

(If you do have filters set up, though, Priority Inbox can work around them if it feels a message is important enough, or it will respect your filters at all costs—depending on how you set it up in the preferences.)

Google paints Priority Inbox as an enterprise offering, but it's available to all Gmail users. The company has already begun rolling it out to all users in all languages, while Google Apps users have to turn on the "pre-release features" setting before they'll be able to see it.