We've been fans of Gmail's Priority Inbox feature ever since it launched, but it was sometimes hard to tell why Gmail marked a message as important. It turns out, you don't even need to leave the inbox view to find out.
If you open up a messaged marked Important and hit "show details", you can actually see a line of text explaining why that message was marked as important. Usually it's something like "the people in the conversation", "because the message was sent directly to you", or "because you marked it as important", but it's still pretty nice to know—especially when something shows up in your Priority Inbox that shouldn't necessarily be there. We've mentioned this once before, but what's even handier is that you can also get this information right from the inbox by hovering over the "important" icon (as shown in the image to the left).