• CNN et al., Tuesday, August 31, 2010 1:47 PM

Google doesn't pretend that Gmail pays the bills, but that doesn't keep the search giant from continually trying to improve the popular service. Its latest effort is Priority Inbox, which will push users' most important emails to the top of their inboxes.

"It used to be people wanted to separate spam from not-spam," Gmail product director Keith Coleman tells CNN. "But now, the not-spam is of varying degrees of importance."

VentureBeat calls Priority Inbox "an ambitious new attack on the problem" of email overload. Bigger picture, "Google is competing feverishly to get businesses, universities and government agencies to switch to Gmail and other software that competes with Microsoft's Office and Outlook software," reports MercuryNews.com.

What's more, in making the enhancements, "Google is really going back to one of its core assets, which is Gmail," Ray Valdes, an analyst for Gartner, tells Mercury News.

In late 2008, "Yahoo had something similar in mind when it initiated its 'smarter inbox' strategy that used two-way connections as a filter for email," notes Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land. "That capability is no longer present in YMail though the company continues to pursue a social strategy in email."

While younger generations seem to consider email too "slow," the medium remains a key for of communication for many, and professionals in particular.

Presently, over 294 billion e-mails are sent daily, while the average corporate computer user sends and receives about 110 e-mails, According to digital researchers the Radicati Group.

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