Most email users suffer from a similar issue - wading through hoards of junk email to find the few important messages that you really need to respond to. If you use Google's Gmail email service, a new feature has been announced that promises to make sorting through email much easier.

The new addition is called Priority Inbox and is currently a beta feature that looks to tackle email overload for users of all types. Google reckons that it is pretty good at filtering spam into the spam folder but a lot of mail that isn’t that important gets through to the inbox, yet that mail isn't spam. Google lovingly calls this type of mail “bacn”.

The new Priority Inbox feature scans email as it comes into the users Gmail account and flags some of it as important using a variety of flagging methods. Those flagging methods include looking for email from the people you message with the most and which messages you open and respond too. The more you use Gmail the better the filtering of important messages will be according to Google.

The user can also help Gmail learn what messages are important by clicking on a "+" or "-" button that is at the top of the inbox to show if a message is important or not. Priority Inbox will be rolled out to all Gmail users over the next week. Users can tell when the update has reached their account by looking for the flagged "New! Priority Inbox" link in the top right corner of the Gmail account or the Priority Inbox tab in Gmail Settings.

Google also recently merged Google Voice and Gmail to allow calls right from the Gmail interface.