inboxvudu logo (1)Email is here to stay, but apps trying to make it better might not be doing so well. Last year, Dropbox announced it was shutting down the once-innovative Mailbox app two years after buying it. Now, InboxVudu is shutting down.

The service and app, which scans emails using natural language processing to surface the most important messages, will suspend its services on Feb. 29. The service’s developer, Parakweet, is also closing Twitter-mining service BookVibe.

“Since we started in 2010, many more companies have woken up to the power of [natural language processing] and we believe our team can now make a greater impact with our skills on other projects,” an announcement on the Parakweet site said. “With that in mind, we will be shutting down our BookVibe and InboxVudu products on 29th February, 2016 in order to focus on these new projects.”

Parakweet, based in San Francisco, opened engineering offices in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood in 2013 as it expanded its natural language processing initiatives with $2 million in funding.

A previous App of the Week on GeekWire, InboxVudu has helped some of us stay on top of a flood of marketing emails, making it easy to spot requests from editors and sources while filtering out pitches. However, even in the last year, competition to control the email inbox has grown.

Unroll.me, another App of the Week, lets users quickly separate and unsubscribe from junk email, while Google has been slowly improving Inbox by Gmail. Microsoft is jumping further into email too, with a mobile app to make sending quick emails more like texting.

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