According to a statement posted on the Unblab website, AOL has acquired Gtriage and Unblab for the purpose of improving its email services: ‘Change is coming to AOL Mail and I’m excited to be part of it. I’m happy to announce that Unblab (+ Gtriage) has been acquired by AOL. I’ll be joining the AOL Mail team in Palo Alto as a product manager.’

Gtriage is a tool that filters emails and eases the management of the inbox mail as seen in Gmail’s success with the Priority Inbox.

At the beginning of 2011, AOL will launch Project Phoenix, an improved email interface which features a Quick Bar, an instant messages option and social media status updates.  The acquisition of Unblab does not appear to be directly related to their media network approach, but message personalization is an important feature development at the moment, reeling in users at a purposeful level.

Google, for intance, has its Priority Inbox, while Facebook has launched Facebook Mail less than a month ago. Facebook Mail features seamless messaging, conversation history, a social inbox and a new filtered inbox, which is organized differently from Gmail’s Priority Inbox but competes at a certain level, and will likely grow to become more competitive with time. Facebook Mail offers increased privacy settings, file-sharing and SMS options.

Google, on the other hand, implemented Priority Inbox, another intelligent tool for sorting priority mail from the rest of the messages, among other highly personalized messaging features. As Matthew Glotzbach, director of product management in Google’s Enterprise unit, puts it: ‘Piority Inbox is a sort of inverted spam filter which, instead of blocking and setting aside unsolicited messages, prioritizes items in the inbox so that users can attend more quickly to the most important e-mails.’