• New York Times' Bits Blog, Monday, August 23, 2010 2:02 PM

Like many professionals, Hilary Mason knows the feeling of drowning in email. Desperate for a life-preserver, the lead scientist at URL shortening company Bitly built a system to automatically prioritize her Gmail inbox. Her E-Mail Classifier, so called, constantly reorganizes her messages "like a magician shuffling a deck of cards," writes The New York Times' Bits blog. "I think e-mail should be sorted by importance, not by time," Mason tells Bits blogger Nick Bilton.

According to Mason, "The sender and subject line are actually the most important parts of an e-mail because people tend to put more important information in the subject ... I've trained my classifier to understand this and try to determine the best action." According to Bilton, his own email inbox is "a desolate wasteland of unanswered messages that continue to appear like a never ending game of Tetris." Alas, Mason's E-mail Classifier is only being used on her own inbox, but she tells Bilton she hopes to release the code used to analyze messages in the fall.

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