A while later, reader Patrick wrote to ask if one could further filter the inbox to show only those unread messages marked as "important."

Yes. Yes, there is. I know this because Patrick followed up a day later with the solution. (I love it when readers do my job for me. The rest of you are slackers.)

Here's an excerpt from the original post:

Another problem I've encountered is that unread mail keeps getting pushed off the page by newer messages. And you know what they say: out of sight, out of mind. I need a way to view only my unread messages, without having to click through several pages' worth of mail.

Gmail doesn't have a view option for this, but there is a solution: