Fuser: Manage All Your E-Mail in one Convenient Spot

Consider the universal mailbox. The concept of a single place to collect messages of all kinds has been buzzworthy for many years, but it’s never been implemented perfectly. There are universal mailbox applications, but they often include a fair amount of complexity and cost. Now, a new beta online application called Fuser is approaching the concept in a very simple way—focusing on letting you get e-mail from all your accounts in one place, and messages from your social networks in the same place.

I’ve been using Fuser, have added a number of my e-mail and social network accounts to it, and I am a fan. Although I initially balked at the idea of supplying all of my user names and passwords to one aggregator, the service is useful enough that I overcame these concerns.

Fuser keeps it simple. Unlike the many other universal mailbox concepts I’ve seen, which usually attempt to put voice mail, e-mail, and other types of messages altogether in one complicated view, Fuser just provides you an aerial view of your e-mail messaging engines, and the ability to check, send, delete and compose in one place.


In general, the more e-mail and social network accounts you have, the more useful you’ll find Fuser to be. I registered for free at the site in about 60 seconds, supplied a code to launch Fuser (I was required to upgrade a version of Java first), and then it took about three minutes to supply six e-mail account and social network user names and passwords. Anyone on a Windows PC, a Mac, or Linux can do the same.

Once my accounts were specified, I was able to look at an aerial view of all of them, including my MySpace account, where read messages and unread messages were conveniently broken out according to which account they were in. It was also quick and easy to compose hotmail and gmail messages directly from within Fuser, without having to go launch separate applications.

A piece of documentation I got with Fuser cites a study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project that found that the average user has 3.1 e-mail accounts. I have more than 10 if you count social networking messaging systems in. If you use fewer than three, Fuser is probably not for you. But if you’re like me, and you’re able to tolerate the idea of supplying user names and passwords for your accounts, you’ll appreciate this free application.

Do you have any good tips on e-mail tools or how to be more efficient with e-mail?

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