Cloze — Free App Organizes and Analyzes Your Inbox

It’s fascinating to see the new approaches to managing e-mail cropping up. We recently covered Mailbox, which is receiving a huge amount of attention and has nearly 1 million people in the rollout queue. Also newly available is Cloze (free), which the developer characterizes as “The noise-cancelling inbox for e-mail and social.”

It combines your email accounts and social network messages into a single inbox, and uses an algorithm to analyze your inbox and prioritize your correspondents who it thinks are most important to you. It integrates email, Facebook, Linked In, and Twitter. After it analyzes your inbox, it creates a list of key people, so you can focus on those messages that matter most.

Like Mailbox, the goal of Cloze is to help you efficiently deal with messages. The options for responding include Now, Today, Tomorrow, and Next Week. It automatically keeps your list of key people up-to-date, and you can manually add people to the list.

Unlike Mailbox, Cloze supports iCloud. And it supports any other IMAP account, such as Gmail, but it doesn’t support POP accounts. Like iCloud, you cannot only access the service via an app but also can access it online via the Cloze website.

In addition to these features, the app has a range of unusual features you won’t likely see in any other email app. It actually analyzes your relationships and gives a score for each relationship according to six categories: Dormancy, Frequency, Responsiveness, Privacy, Freshness, and Balance. It even generates a list called Losing Touch, which notes those relationships that are fading. The app even gives you tips about relationships.

Note that both the app and the online Cloze service are free.

Given the deluge of messages everyone faces these days, it’s great to see fresh approaches to managing the situation.

This video demo gives you a sense for how Cloze works: