Saving time and money on email

We use email for everything from notifying a co-worker in the next cube that we're ready for lunch to storing important documents for later use. Despite all the collaboration software out there, email is still the workhorse of the office and often the home.

So now comes Google with the idea to create something like a spam folder but for the really good stuff. InformationWeek reports:

Priority Inbox relies on a filtering system to sort significant messages from less significant ones. It differs from Gmail's existing user-configurable, keyword-based filters in that it filters automatically, can be corrected when it fails, and tries to learn on its own.

Google suggests that Priority Inbox is like the Gmail spam folder, except for the good stuff. Training is simple: A "+" icon puts e-mail into the Priority Inbox; a "-" icon takes e-mail out. The system also considers frequently e-mailed people to be important.

Here are some numbers from Google.

• The average information worker receives 150 messages per day.
• Testers spent 6% less time managing e-mail using Priority Inbox.
• With the estimate that information workers spend 13 hours per week on e-mail, that works out to about 46 minutes saved per week.

For employers, InformationWeek says, that could translate into a productivity savings of over 40 hours per year. In monetary terms, that would be worth over $1,100 annually per Gmail user for private sector companies and almost $1,600 annually per Gmail user for government agencies,