Zimbra Desktop: integrates your email, Facebook and Twitter accounts

Managing even just the day-to-day basics of your online life can be a challenge, these days, with work and personal email accounts to monitor, Facebook and Twitter to check, calendars, task lists and more to be monitored.

But if you’re tired of navigating a raft of interfaces just to do essentially the same thing – check for, or send messages – then the free Zimbra Desktop may be able to help, as it integrates many useful services into a single application.

The program is essentially an email client, so that’s probably the best place to get started. You can use it to connect to your Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail and regular IMAP/ POP3 accounts. It’ll download email messages from webmail accounts so they’re accessible even when you’re offline. And there’s the usual basic email client functionality. So you can compose and send emails from any account; create new folders and tags to help organise your mail; build filters to automatically route mail to the appropriate folder; maintain an address book for all your contacts, and more.