What if your e-mail program was more intelligent, was able to let you know only when you got important e-mails, but not unimportant ones? And I'm not talking a spam filter. The unlikely company spurring this blog: AOL.

I'm not talking about the ability to highlight e-mails from important people in a different color than other e-mails. Rather, I'm talking about a way to alert you only when you get an e-mail from one of your most important contacts, provide a summary of what's in that e-mail, and potentially add additional things such as presence information telling you where the sender is and if they're available.

Yes, that AOL. The company's new AOL Mail Gadget, currently in test mode and launched at Microsoft's Mix conference this week (it's based on Silverlight), is a Vista Sidebar Gadget that allows its users to define a list of five top contacts, called the user's "A-list." The gadget then notifies the user when any of those five contacts has e-mailed them, and can display the beginning of said e-mail. Additionally, if the contact is on AOL Instant Messenger, it can show away messages and whether the user is online or offline. Users can change their A-list at will and AOL execs say it may look at allowing for automatic, potentially time-based changes.

This model, which AOL calls "social mail," could have incredible relevance and use for business e-mail. Like you probably do, I receive much more e-mail than I could possibly read every day. Whether it's about a product or technology I don't care about or don't write about, or whether it's something bordering on spam, I'd love to skip the bad stuff and head straight for my most important e-mails. Sure, there already are ways to do things, like highlighting e-mails from certain people, but AOL does this as a standalone notification gadget. There's no need for this necessarily to be a Vista Sidebar Gadget, or built into Silverlight. One parallel would be to have an option inside the e-mail application that hides all e-mail except what's from the most important contacts, rather than just highlighting.

The notion of a changing "a-list" also is interesting. If I use the same e-mail program during both my social and work lives, I could set up my top contacts to change every day at 5 p.m. or whenever I leave work. If I'm working on a short-term project, I could temporarily add top contacts, only to remove them soon after the project ended.

To take this idea one step further, relevance engines could be a powerful way to sort through e-mail. I could parse my e-mail to alert me when I get messages with certain keywords and phrases that are most important to whatever I'm currently working on or, in a business setting, manage the notification so certain corporate news always makes it through. Spam filters already do this; why can't we take it one step further? Just a thought.