Every morning I wake up to about 15 emails, but this represents only the beginning: throughout the day the flow is steady. It’s understandable that, under these circumstances, I’d eventually lose contact with someone and not realize it.

Enter Etacts. Give your Gmail login, this service will analyze your email history and tell you which contacts are most important to you. It will also tell you how long its been since you’ve contacted these  important people.

The benefits for a salesperson wanting to stay in touch with clients is obvious, but how could it help your personal life? Well, losing touch with friends isn’t always intentional either. If you have a friend you used to email regularly, but stopped without realizing it, this app can point this out. You can also set the program to remind you to stay in touch with a person, useful if there’s someone you really don’t want to forget.

Of course the program’s information isn’t perfect: it only knows about emails. My most important contact is my wife, who I supposedly haven’t contacted in 20 days despite waking up next to every day. Obviously the application doesn’t know about in person contact, Facebook messages or phone calls. But if all you want is information about how you use email, that’s what this web application delivers in spades.

A quick word to the security conscious: the service never emails your contacts without permission, and no message data is stored on Etacts’ servers. Data is protected using 256-bit SSL encryption.

• Find who your most important contacts are on Gmail
• Discover how long it’s been since you last contacted clients, contacts, friends and family via Gmail
• Send out semi-personalized messages in bulk

Check out Etacts @ www.etacts.com (via digital.venturebeat.com)