Google has launched a new ‘priority inbox’ service for its web-based email service, Gmail. Basically Gmail monitors a user’s email behaviour and ranks email’s in order of importance, bumping the most important and unread emails to the top of the reading pane.

This got me thinking, could a priority email service spell the end of the PR mailer? By PR mailer I mean a mass mailed press release with something like ‘Innovative, groundbreaking thought leader comments on market leading spanner’ in the subject line. As 99% of hacks would hit the delete button every time they received something like this, a priority inbox system would send this mailer to the bottom of the pile, meaning not even the catchiest of subject lines will make it onto the journo’s email radar.

Good PRs will always thoroughly scrutinise whether a story is newsworthy or not, select the right journalists that would cover that story and then contact them by their preferred method. Crap PRs will send a mailer to a Gorkana (replace with whatever service you use) list.

So in an industry under constant pressure to reduce spamming, a priority inbox could be the catalyst needed to encourage more sophisticated PR activity.

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