By design, ClearContext ranks incoming messages on several characteristics including sender, message and thread priority, thread participation, and message directness. For a detailed description of each of these factors, see our user guide.
The weighting given to each of these characteristics can be tweaked via the ClearContext Options menu. See Tools > Options > ClearContext > Scoring Options for a screen with sliders that allow the adjustment of each factor’s weighting. The default settings represent our best guess at what makes an email important to you. However, we strongly encourage everyone to adjust the sliders on our scoring screen to get the most out of ClearContext prioritization.
For example, if you work in sales and receive a great deal of important email from new contacts who are not in your address book, you might want to adjust the Known Addresses weighting down and the Thread Participation weighting up to ensure that email conversations started by you and/or that you have participated in receive a higher score (and therefore higher prominence in your inbox).