NutshellMail is one of those services that might be hard to wrap your head around, either because it’s concept seems unfeasible or just otherwise too good to be true. So what’s it do?

NutshellMail lets you sneak around your company’s firewalls in order to receive your emails. It does so by “forwarding” your emails to you from its centralized system, giving you access to your blocked emails from a service that’s accepted by your company. Assuming the security risks are the only reason why your boss won’t let you check your email at work, NutshellMail is a viable option for many working in corporate America.

Upon launching last year, NutshellMail also offered basic social networking integration, forwarding you new messages from Facebook to your inbox. This week, however, NutshellMail has completely rebuilt its Facebook integration using Facebook Connect. In addition to forwarding you new messages, you’ll also get friend requests, birthday alerts, group and event invites, pokes, and status updates.

Yes, that’s basically all the stuff you’d receive in your Facebook email alerts (depending on your privacy settings), with the inclusion of your friends’ status updates. This may or may not be something you’d be interested in receiving in your work email inbox, but for many NutshellMail users the status updates are a good thing.

Mark Schmulen of NutshellMail mentioned that “many of our users have commented that they before using NutshellMail, they never thought to read status updates, but since we provide the status updates in a email-based format, many users now claim to be addicted to reading their friends’ updates.”

Perhaps that’s just the attitude Facebook is hoping for, as developers will be encouraged to take advantage of Facebook’s Open API for status updates in the future. Taking the Facebook status updates outside of the Facebook profile pages certainly broaden the exposure potential of the very viral feature, and make Facebook itself increasingly competitve with the likes of Twitter.