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Email is old fashioned, right? Not so fast - that rich source of data about your personal connections and interests is finally emerging as a platform for some really innovative services.

Yesterday we saw the launch of Gmail's new Priority Inbox, which automatically sorts inbound messages by priority. That's something we've been expecting since hints of it emerged 18 months ago. This Spring, Gmail began offering secure, programatic access permission for the contents of your inbox - a move we said heralded a new era of inbox applications. Now we're finally seeing that flood of services emerge. Here are three of the best new email apps that you don't want to miss. Following screenshots and a screencast, we discuss what it all means and how these are just the beginning of the coming era of email as a platform.

If you use Gmail for business and haven't tried out browser plug-in Rapportive, your work life online is not yet complete. The small company behind the must-have software said this weekend that it has raised $1 million from a group of All Star, but unnamed, angel investors. This morning serial entrepreneur and email newsletter barron Jason Calacanis announced on Twitter that he was among that group.

Rapportive replaces the ads in your Gmail side bar with a picture of the person who sent you an email, their job title from LinkedIn, recent Twitter messages they've sent and more. Once you install it, you may have a hard time imagining life without it. I know I don't want to think about this little company not being around anymore. So it's good news that Rapportive just put some money in the bank.

Email may be old fashioned, but it's still where we spend a lot of our time online. Today Google announced that its webmail service Gmail is becoming all the richer with the inclusion of support for sending Google Calendar invitations inside the email composition window.

In addition to being able to insert invitations, you can also cross reference your calendar availability with the availability of anyone included in your email thread that you have given permission to see the Google Calendar. It's not a perfect system, but it's pretty neat and it demonstrates the potential for building cool new features on top of our email inboxes.

Cambridge UK startup Rapportive has released a Firefox and Chrome extension that will replace the ads in your Gmail with photos, biographic data and social media links, including a live display of recent Tweets, for whoever you're corresponding with by email. It's fantastic and takes about 2 minutes to set up.

The three person team behind Rapportive queries data provider Rapleaf for the social media profile data and does some local caching for performance optimization. Let's stop talking about it though - just go download it! Check out the screenshot and details below.