The Bottom Line
Pros
- FuseMail Fused Personal offers IMAP as well as powerful web-based access
- Solid filtering and an optional challenge/response system tame junk mail in FuseMail
- FuseMail Fused Personal has smart folders and a calendar and reads RSS feeds
Cons
- FuseMail Fused Personal seems unreliable, unfinished and unstable at times
- Web-bugs are not prevented in FuseMail Fused Personal
- FuseMail Fused Personal's web-based access does not support encrypted email
Description
- FuseMail Fused Personal is an email service with IMAP and web-based access.
- The FuseMail web interface supports HTML editing and includes an address book and calendar features.
- Comprehensive spam filtering and an optional challenge/response system help prevent junk mail.
- FuseMail includes flexible message search and smart folders that automatically find relevant mail.
- Both FuseMail's smart folders and RSS folders that aggregate RSS feeds can be accessed via IMAP.
- Filters performing many actions let you organize mail further in FuseMail Fused Personal.
- You can have FuseMail Fused Personal auto-respond to mail or set up a vacation message.
Guide Review - FuseMail Fused Personal
You can have FuseMail periodically fetch mail from POP, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail or AOL accounts, and distinct personalities let you write mail from any of these accounts in FuseMail, too. While FuseMail could be a bit more generous on the storage side, its personalized Bayesian spam filtering (and optionally challenge/response) filters keep Fused accounts relatively junk free. Good mail is well and automatically organized with smart folders that find relevant messages as they arrive.
These folders and the integrated RSS aggregator that lets you read, archive, filter and search news feeds like emails in FuseMail are accessible anywhere via IMAP as well.
Unfortunately, the RSS feeds I set up never showed any news, which points to a general problem with FuseMail. While loaded with features, gimmicks and great ideas, much of FuseMail seems only 98% done.
Documentation is meager, some features are a bit confusing during setup, not optimized for fast access and sometimes show erratic behavior. It is also unfortunate that FuseMail does not offer secure messaging in the web-based interface and that you cannot disable the automatic download of remote images to protect your privacy.
