Ever wonder if your inbox is a true reflection of the most important people in your life? Immersion, a free new web tool developed by two graduate students at M.I.T., securely scans your email and derives discoveries about how you know the various people in your life.

Here’s how it works: Once you grant Immersion secure access to your Gmail, Yahoo or Outlook account, it starts culling through the metadata in your email, the “To,” “From,” and “CC” fields, and the timestamps of each email you’ve ever sent or received. It then generates a visual map of who the most important people in your life are, at least by your mailbox’s standards. Considering we spend an average of 13 hours a week reading emails, our inbox may be our largest social networking platform.

You can click on any person to see how many times you’ve corresponded with them, and Immersion even knows who introduced the two of you in the first place. Naturally, an app like this raises concerns about privacy, but founders Daniel Smilkov and Deepak Jagdish maintain that the program only looks at the metadata in emails, not the content. Once the app completes its task, users can delete the metadata and remove the permission to access their accounts.

At the very least, Immersion is a cool visual reminder that behind all of those emails are real human connections.

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