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Microsoft's Office Labs group today released a prototype plug-in for Outlook 2007 that automatically judges the importance of incoming e-mail messages and ranks them using a star system. The group says the idea is to help people focus first on the most pressing messages in their in-boxes.

The free Office Labs research prototype, called Email Prioritizer, is an adaptation of a longstanding Microsoft Research project called Priorities. That project, which we profiled in this 2005 story, uses an algorithm to analyze incoming messages and assign them a priority based on factors including the relationship of the recipient to the sender, key phrases in a message, dates and times. For example, a message from your boss, with questions, would probably be assigned a high priority.

The system is flexible: Users can change the priority of individual messages, essentially correcting the algorithm. The program then learns from and adjusts to those personal preferences.

The new prototype from Office Labs also includes a "do not disturb" feature that "pauses" incoming e-mail for a specified period of time.

What's the purpose of all this? As Microsoft Research's Eric Horvitz explained in our 2005 story, the concept is to let people rest assured that they'll be alerted to a significant message, without having to bother with a trivial message if they're in the middle of something more important. Of course, the level of comfort people feel will depend on the reliability of the algorithm. In that way, the three-star ranking system in the Office Labs prototype could provide an interesting real-world test of the technology.

Some big caveats: Like other Office Labs projects, this is an experiment, not an official product, and Microsoft therefore offers no product support. If you use the program, the company says it will log data about which features are used, but it says the data won't be logged in a way that would identify you personally with your usage patterns. The company says it doesn't have any current plans to include this as a feature in future Outlook versions. Email Prioritizer only works with Outlook 2007, not with earlier versions or with other e-mail programs.

Here's the FAQ and the download page.

It will be interesting to hear what people think: Would you trust a software algorithm to decide how much attention a message deserves?