What would you do without email? Email is one of those things that’s a necessity when working on most projects. So it’s not surprising that most of us (designers and non-designers alike) have at least 2 email accounts.

How do you keep track of all your email accounts when you’re out of the office?

With work-related responsibilities, I have 6 email accounts that need to be checked throughout any given day. I manage those email accounts with Thunderbird and an array of folders and rules that I’ve set up when I’m at my computer. However, when I’m not at my work computer, I have to sign into 4 or 5 different webmail accounts to check my email.

A Better Way to Manage Your Emails

A while back, I heard about Zenbe, a free online service that allows you to manage multiple email accounts from one single Zenbe account. I’m going on vacation in a few days, so I finally got around to setting up an account and playing around with it.

With Zenbe, you can:

• Manage and keep track of emails from multiple email accounts (with tagging)
• Collaborate and share files, emails, calendars, agendas and chat through private ZenPages
• Update Facebook and Twitter accounts
• Chat through Google Talk
• Easily view and sort attachment files

Not Just Webmail

More than simply checking multiple email accounts; you’re able to actually manage all of your email from multiple accounts. Big difference.

If you’re pulling emails from multiple email accounts into a single inbox, you’d better have a good way to organize them. Zenbe does an amazing job of this with very minimal input from you.

Zenbe’s main window and interface is easy to use and intuitive.

When you set Zenbe to link to an email account , you can enter tags for that account. When Zenbe pulls emails from that email account, it then automatically tags them so you can see what account they belong to in a glance—even without opening the email.

These tags are also automatically applied to the emails you send from Zenbe—letting you keep track of which emails you sent from which account.

If you want even more control over your emails, you can setup rules and apply tags based on criteria such as who the email’s from, the recipients, subject, etc. This lets me tag emails from specific clients and is a nice alternative to the folders I currently use in Thunderbird.

You can also tag individual emails manually if you want.

Also note that Zenbe doesn’t reroute your emails—they still get delivered to your regular email accounts and thus to your desktop email program of choice.

Collaboration With ZenPages

Zenbe has something called ZenPages that lets you communicate with others easily. You can add:

• Sets of emails (by email address or tags)
• Files
• Calendars
• Agendas and more

After you create a ZenPage, you invite people by email address to share the ZenPage with you (Note: the people you invite don’t need a Zenbe account to use the ZenPage). New emails, files and such are added to the ZenPage automatically as they come in.

You’re able to collaborate and share files back and forth on a secure page. Only those who you choose to invite get a link to your ZenPage. You can even chat live right from the ZenPage.

ZenPages Video Overview

Subscribe to the RSS feed for the ZenPage and you’ll be able to see when people add content to the page.

ZenPages are great solutions for those who are collaborating on a project and want to have related information easily accessible to everyone involved.

Contacts and Your Address Book

Another great feature is that you can easily import your address book into Zenbe. I just opened my Thunderbird address book, exported to CSV and imported the file in Zenbe. Zenbe makes it easy to organize those contacts as well.

I have a huge list of email contacts in my address book. After importing them into Zenbe, I can check the star next to each one that I want to make a favorite. Then, I can choose the option to show the full list of contacts, or only my favorites. I use this to show only the people I contact the most.

Zenbe lets you add unlimited email accounts and phone numbers to a single contact. You can enter and add more details such as more than one address (if for instance there’s an office address and a residental one).

If you don’t have any email rules setup, you can also search for emails from specific contacts right from the address book.

Zenbe also pulls in Gravatar icons for the contacts in your address book when available.

The handling of contacts is nicer and feels more like an actual desktop app than any other web-based app (including Gmail) that I’ve used.

More Than Just Email

Even though managing multiple email accounts from one account is simple with Zenbe, and sharing information almost fun with ZenPages, there’s lots more that you can do.

Calendar

Zenbe has its own calendar. You can also import calendars (.ICS and .ICAL formats) or subscribe to web calendars.

It’s important to note that the events that are imported from other calendars are editable, but do not sync back to the original. This may not be a deal-breaker for some, but if you just want to keep track of your agendas and upcoming events, this works just fine.

Zenbe also sports agenda and todo sections in the sidebar. These, like most of the features in Zenbe, are simple to learn and pretty intuitive.

Social Networking

You can link to your Facebook, Twitter and Google Talk accounts right from the Zenbe sidebar.

For example, the Facebook tab lets you:

• Change your Facebook status message
• See updates from your friends
• Get notified of new messages and friend requests

A Powerful Tool For Email and Communication

Zenbe is a full-featured tool for communicating with your clients across multiple email accounts, Facebook, Twitter, Google Talk and more. If you have more than one email account and you’re looking for a better way to manage and organize your email, give Zenbe a try.

Remember: it’s free and it doesn’t take over your existing email accounts (meaning all your emails will still be sent to your desktop app).

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