Salesforce nabs another Y Combinator startup in email contact manager Etacts

Salesforce, a developer of customer relationship management (CRM) software, announced today that it has acquired email contact manager Etacts for an undisclosed sum.

Etacts works as a plugin for Google’s Gmail and a web application. It scans email messages and determines which contacts are the most important. It then reminds users to keep in touch with those people and to respond to email messages from them. Users can set custom reminders for when Etacts should send notes to keep up the relationship — which can be once a week, month, quarter or year.

The announcement came after Etacts said it was discontinuing its service come February next year. That means that Salesforce is probably looking to integrate the Etacts tools directly into its CRM software suite.

Etacts also operates with phone records for users willing to share their calling history. The service can display all your recent email and phone conversations. The idea is to help both individual employees and executives manage the deluge of email messages they receive on a daily basis a little more efficiently, and to single out the most important relationships so those never dissolve.

Salesforce seems to have a lot of love for companies that have gone through Y Combinator. The CRM software developer also bought Heroku, which develops and deploys web-based applications that rely on the programming language Ruby on Rails, for $212 million. Given that the company specializes in providing some good tools to help manage business and customer relationships, the acquisition is a no-brainer.

Aside from having the Y Combinator pedigree, Etacts has raised money from some pretty high-level angel investors. The San Francisco, Calif.-based company launched in February this year and raised $700,000 in a seed funding round from the likes of Ron Conway, former Netscape CTO Eric Hahn and actor Ashton Kutcher.