谷歌邮箱管家也玩魔术

邮箱里每天都躺着一大堆的邮件，你是不是有不知该先查阅哪封的烦恼呢？那就让谷歌邮箱管家帮你忙吧，它将自动将你的邮件按优先顺序排列。是不是很神奇呢？ 

RENEE MONTAGNE, host:

If your email is driving you crazy, if you're getting too many in your inbox and you feel like it takes too long to sort through and clear it all out, welcome to the world.

Market researchers say nearly 300 billion emails are sent each day, and the average person sends and receives 110 messages.

To the rescue, perhaps, is Google. Today, the company is releasing a new program for its Gmail service that will supposedly set priorities for the inbox.

NPR's Laura Sydell reports.

LAURA SYDELL: Not sure which email to read first? Wrong emails turn up in the spam box? The new Google system sorts through all of your emails, and it puts the important ones in a separate priority inbox.

Mr. MATTHEW GLOTZBACH (Director, product management, Google): The magic here is really that it's personalized.

SYDELL: Matthew Glotzbach is one of the engineers who figured out how to assess your behavior and the contents of your messages and sort out what's important.

Mr. GLOTZBACH: Looking at the people that you're emailing with back and forth and looking at your actions - like which messages you've replied, which messages you've starred, you know, and which messages you've deleted - to try and get a sense for what's important to you at what time.

SYDELL: Glotzbach claims that in Google's testing, people who used the new system saved about a weeks worth of time over the course of a year. Inboxes are a big time suck, says Martha(ph) Egan, the author of "Inbox/Detox."

Ms. MARSHA EGAN (Author, "Inbox/Detox"): Any technology that can help people choose what's important and what isn't can be valuable if used in the right way.

SYDELL: Got that? She said if used the right way. Gmail may be able to learn based on your past actions, but what if you think too many things are important?

Ms. EGAN: When you're trying to manage your email and your inbox, managing yourself is more important than managing all of those emails.

SYDELL: Egan says some people even get so obsessed with using time management software that they waste even more time.

Ms. EGAN: They become a slave to the technology and spend more time managing the technology than using it as an advantage to them.

SYDELL: The question is: How can you develop technology that gets around the human tendency to waste time? Dr. Michael Freed is working on an answer. He's a researcher at SRI, a non-profit that does research for government and business. Freed wants your inbox to actually do tasks for you.

Dr. MICHAEL FREED (Researcher, SRI): What you'd like to experience is have your email client say, hey. Looks like this message requires that you go change the sales forecast for Acme upwards by 15k for the third quarter. How about if I just go change cell c23 and make that change for you?'

SYDELL: Freed says we are getting closer to the day when that will be possible. But he does see Google's new tool as an advance that's a step up from just having a spam box. Still, for some, says Freed, the best answer may be an old fashioned human assistant who, at least for now, is likely to still have plenty of work to do.

Laura Sydell, NPR News, San Francisco.