Universal E-Mail Inbox Service a Bit Clunky

By ANICK JESDANUN

NEW YORK — It sounded like a dream come true for someone with dozens of e-mail and social-networking accounts: A free Web service called Fuser that lets you check all of your messages from a central location.

Alas, after giving Fuser a whirl, I’ll still be checking my accounts separately.

I found Fuser still a bit clunky, though it does show some promise.

I could easily add accounts from the major Web mail services — Google Inc.’s Gmail, Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp.’s Hotmail and Time Warner Inc.’s AOL — and check them all through one inbox.

I eventually got my EarthLink and Road Runner accounts to work, after Fuser’s tech support helped identify my company’s own firewalls as the culprit. Besides the major Web mail services, Fuser supports any e-mail account using POP3 or IMAP mail technology, which is to say most of the rest.

The Fuser inbox even incorporates messages from the two leading online hangouts, Facebook and MySpace.

Sadly, all I got through MySpace were spam messages and ones from the universal friend “Tom” — as in Tom Anderson, the MySpace co-founder who is automatically added to new MySpace accounts. It wouldn’t be fair, though, to blame Fuser for my unpopularity.

I do like that each account is color-coded. For instance, an orange dot next to a message means it’s from Yahoo; a green dot means Hotmail.

With Fuser, I can choose to turn individual accounts temporarily on and off, such that only Gmail and AOL messages show up, simply by clicking on the e-mail address. That’s handy if, say, I want to filter out all the junk from an account I use primarily for online shopping.

But the service could be more user-friendly in that regard.

To isolate one account, I’d need to turn all accounts off, then turn the one account on. There ought to be a way to pull messages from just that account instantly.

I also had to put up with a number of annoyances, including ads appended to the bottom of outgoing messages.

But what frustrated me most was the performance. E-mails can take several seconds to open and in a few cases two minutes, reminding me of the dial-up days.

Furthermore, Fuser didn’t work at all on the major browsers available for Mac OS X 10.3.9. I blame the developers for this. With so many types of systems and configurations out there — I tested Fuser on four Windows and two Macintosh machines — a good Web service must be more tolerant and consistent.

I’m not ready to give up on Fuser entirely. But I plan to wait until it works out the kinks and adds more features. Until then, I’ll check my 48-odd e-mail and five social-networking accounts separately.

Just don’t expect any quick replies.

Originally published by ANICK JESDANUN Associated Press.

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