Shareflow was recently nominated by About.com for “Best Email Innovation of 2009“.

Please show your support by heading over to About.com and casting a vote for us!

If you haven’t checked out Shareflow yet, get a free account and invite some of the people you communicate with the most. It’s a great replacement for group mailing lists, whether it’s for your local soccer team or an entire department at your company. Try it out today.

Shareflow, once people try it, gets used to collect more and more comments, files, email, links, whatever people want to save or share, either as individuals or as part of a group.

We have been debating if the  25 MB limit on our free account is limiting adoption.

So forget the limit.

Starting tomorrow, we will be offering  FREE Shareflow with up to 1 GB of storage.

Crazy. That ought to keep you going for quite awhile.  Years, probably.  No invite needed.  Just sign up at http://getshareflow.com.

(If you already have a free Shareflow account, you get the extra space too!)

One of our customers’ favorite features on Zenbe Mail is Files View.  In Zenbe Mail, Files View lets you quickly see any attachments or files you have, without having to track down the email they came or went with.

When someone posts a file in Shareflow, you can find it easily with the search controls in the upper right without needing Files View.

Still, Files View is useful, and some users have asked for this functionality in Shareflow.

On my way out to some meetings  last Friday I made a passing comment as I put on my shoes (we have a no-shoe office), and by the time I got back, our amazing development team had Files view on Shareflow deployed to our staging environment.  They did this using only their left hands, using their right hands to work on their regular queue.

If you don’t see it already, it will be deployed to your Shareflow environment soon.  Look for “Files” under “Starred Post” on your Shareflow page.  The initial functionality will be somewhat simplistic, but expect more expressive filtering and sharing features to be deployed over the next couple of weeks.  Enjoy.

Our most-requested feature will be released shortly: real-time email updates.

Soon, Shareflow users will get real-time notifications via email when new posts appear.  Replying to an email notification shows up as a comment on Shareflow, and sends an email notification to other flow members.

Now your whole team stays connected on Shareflow whether you choose to use it through email, on the web site, via the desktop widget, or on your mobile device.

Real-time email notifications are delivered in addition to your daily digests. Both types of emails can be turned on or off independently.

If you have not used Shareflow, you might ask “If I am just going to get emails and reply to emails all day long, why use Shareflow at all?”

When you use Shareflow, your communication stays organized and accessible:

1) In your email inbox, new stuff comes in on top and old stuff gets pushed off the bottom, regardless of importance. Shareflow keeps everything organized in separate conversations, called “flows”.  You can use email or the web site to communicate through Shareflow and nobody has to do any extra work to keep things organized. No more setting up complicated rules to file important emails from the team – you see the info you need where you expect it.

Keeping important, long running conversations organized is the best way to keep everyone working well together. Cluttering up your the inbox of your team members is probably the worst.

2) Shareflow works in real-time, giving you the immediacy of instant messaging, but the persistence of email or a web page. You can hold a real-time chat with some team members when they are online with you, and the others will be caught up the next time they check in.

3) Shareflow makes it much easier to share files, even very large files.

4) Shareflow is a better way to get work done on your mobile browser. When I open my mobile email on the road, its filled with lots of stuff on a small screen. Finding what’s important is hard. But when I need updates from my most important contacts – like my development team, investors, etc. – I launch the Shareflow mobile web site and can see what’s going on with one click.

With real-time email notifications, everyone will get my Shareflow response right away, and their replies will be added to the flow.

The Details:

• Since many Shareflow users expected real-time email notifications in the first place, flows default to having this feature enabled.
• All flows will have real-time email notifications turned on.
• To disable these notifications for an individual flow, login to Shareflow, select the cog wheel in the upper right, and unselect “Email me notifications of new Activity” on the settings panel.
• Clicking “unsubscribe now” from the footer of any Shareflow email will disable ALL types of types of Shareflow emails: daily digests and real-time notifications.

We think Shareflow demonstrates there are better ways for teams to work together than email, chat, or Google Wave.

We are justifiably proud that, even as a small team, we have deployed Shareflow as a collaboration platform that tens of thousands of teams use on the web, on your computer desktop, on your mobile device, or via our developer API.

Despite our technical achievements, we are lousy at touting our own products.  Lousy. So its very helpful and much appreciated when our customers do it for us.

Some of our favorites recently are:

The new editing functions are great! … [a] downside of Google Wave … is anyone can join a wave and change your posts. Very dangerous. With ShareFlow, I’m in control of who participates so a confidential discussion stays confidential. Way to go! Good job. Though I don’t need to, I subscribed to the paid model to show my support for you folks.

ShareFlow is complete GENIUS in its simplicity and straightforwardness yet without lacking functionality

Zenbe ShareFlow… lightweight, totally web-based. As easy as Staples button.

My friends and I just ditched Wave because it was too obnoxious. Moved back to Shareflow.

Zenbe Personal, our green-bordered free email service, will be shutting down at the end of February.

When we launched Zenbe Personal in the early Summer of ‘08, it embodied some of our ideas on the future of messaging: simple email aggregation, tagging, files view, zenpages, and quite a few other innovations.  Zenbe Personal received respectable attention, and people signed up faster than we ever expected.

Unfortunately, Fall of ‘08 derailed our plans to turn Zenbe Personal into a sustainable business, and we had to pursue other opportunities.

Despite no updates, no customer support, and no new signups for well over a year, Zenbe Personal still has quite a following.  We are sad to shut it down, but Zenbe Personal is becoming increasingly more difficult and expensive to maintain.

Zenbe Personal customers have been notified, given an extensive migration plan instructing them on how to download their personal data, and have plenty of time to move off of Zenbe Personal.

Shareflow and Zenbe Mail (our un-free, blue-bordered offering) are unaffected.

In fact, we will be expanding Shareflow, with more features, more storage, and a simpler signup, all for free.

“More Shareflow for free? Wait a second”, you might ask. “If you are shutting down Zenbe Personal because you can’t pay for  those hard drives, what is up with Shareflow?”

Fair question.

Zenbe Personal was designed in 2007, with different goals and  implemented on a different platform than Shareflow. Shareflow is built on cloud infrastructures that were not a practical reality in 2007.  Running Zenbe Personal for the few tens of thousands of users still using it is expensive.  Shareflow (and, for that matter, Zenbe Mail) costs are lower, and extra capacity costs us pennies at a time.

With Shareflow, enough customers pay for us to continue expanding the free service.

Today we are happy to announce a major upgrade to our group collaboration service Shareflow. With this release we focused on making Shareflow blazingly fast while adding some of the most requested features from our users.

We know from user feedback and our own personal use that once Shareflow is incorporated into your workflow, it becomes an important hub for all your group communication. Our users keep Shareflow open all day and love how it keeps their most important conversation categorized and easily accessible via our powerful search engine. That’s why one of our priorities for this release was focusing on making Shareflow as fast and responsive as possible. How serious are we about performance? We rewrote Shareflow’s user interface from the ground up, optimizing for speed and consistency across our supported browsers. When you open Shareflow today, you’ll notice quicker load times and improved responsiveness as you navigate between flows and perform searches. This work also lays the groundwork for us to build new features and continue to tune performance to make Shareflow even faster.

We really worked on performance with this release, but what would a release be without a few new features? Your feedback as Shareflow users is incredibly important to us, and we’ve included some of our users’ most requested features with this upgrade.

Rich Text In Posts

Shareflow now supports rich-text in your comments and posts. Now you can express your thoughts more clearly using bold, italic, underline, fonts, colors, lists…you get the idea. The rich text controls are neatly tucked away on the right side of the comment field giving you access to bold and italic by default.

Or you can expand the controls to get the full list of text formatting options

(disclaimer: Zenbe does not condone the use of Comic Sans).

Edit a Post

Shareflow now allows you to go back and edit posts after you’ve posted them. Whenever you update a post it will be sorted back to the top of the list of posts in the flow, so your collaborators can see the updates. To edit a post just select the edit button in the context menu on the right corner of each Post. Note you can only edit posts that you created.

You can use this feature to make minor corrections to a post you’ve made after posting it, or to collaboratively build a document based on your collaborators comments. This feature opens up a lot of possibilities for how to use Shareflow that we may not have even considered yet. Try it out and let us know your power user tips.

Gorgeous Image Previews

We brought over the beautiful new image previewer that we build for Zenbe Mail. Now your photos look better than ever and load faster too!

Find That Flow You’re Looking for, Faster!

Shareflow is a flexible system that allows you to decide how to organize your information. Some of our users prefer to use just a few long running flows to collaborate while others like to create many flows each focused on a smaller project or topic. For the latter group we’ve enhanced the Shareflow sidebar to make it easier to find the flow your looking for. First we added sorting options. By default, your list of flows is now sorted by recent activity. This means that your most active flows will always be easily accessible at the top of the list. If you want to see an alphabetical listing of flows, just click the drop down and select “All Flows A-Z”. Another way to quickly find a flow is to click on the binoculars “find” button. You’ll get a text field that you can type the name of the flow in to quickly narrow your list to the flow you are looking for.

One More Thing…

We know that Shareflow has helped many organizations collaborate more effectively, and we want the Shareflow community to grow even more. Today we are announcing our holiday gift to the Shareflow community, unlimited flows on all of our Shareflow plans! That’s right every plan from free to premium now offers unlimited flows, which gives you unlimited flexibility in how you categorize your most important conversations and collaborate with the people that matter most to you!

There’s no better time to head on over to http://getshareflow.com and signup today if you haven’t already. We hope you enjoy all of these enhancements to Shareflow and we are eager to hear your feedback on how we can make the system even better. Please contact us and us know your thoughts.

Happy Holidays, everyone! And here’s to a productive New Year with Shareflow!

We’ve recently made a number of exciting enhancements to the Zenbe Mail. Here’s a summary of what’s new:

Facebook Integration

Teams and individuals using Zenbe Mail can now enable a Facebook tab in their account. If you are the primary administrator of your mail account, here’s how to do it:

1. Login to Zenbe Mail
2. Click on the “admin” link in the upper-right corner
3. Click the “Domain Settings” tab
4. Check the “Enable Facebook Tab” checkbox

Enable Facebook

Refresh your browser and your entire team can now access the Facebook tab.

The Facebook tab allows you to access the status updates of your Facebook network, as well as update your own status, all within Zenbe Mail.

Facebook Integration

Files Enhancements

We improved the way we handle files in the “Files” tab. File thumbnails are generated and served faster. We show nicer preview images. Check out the new image preview panel below:

Image Preview

If the image came to you via email, click on the name or email address at the bottom of the preview and we’ll open the original email in the “Mail” tab.

We also added more powerful search options. You can continue searching for files by adding all or part of the file name in the search field. But you can create more powerful searches using search modifiers. Some examples:

• from:peter

Searches for all files from anyone named ‘peter’

• type:’Pdf’

Restrict searches to PDF files.

• starred

Shows all starred files.

Mix and match search modifiers for powerful searches. For example: “from:peter type:’pdf’ starred” shows all starred PDF files from anyone named peter.

External Email Addresses

Zenbe Mail allows you to create multiple users within your own email domain for a small fee per user, with no minimum commitment. But did you know that you can add a number of external email addresses to your own account at no extra charge? You can add two types of addresses: send only and send and receive. Here’s what it means:

Send-only addresses

Send-only addresses are most commonly used when you are forwarding email from another service – such as Gmail – to your Zenbe Mail account. Another frequent use for send-only address is responding from a ‘mailing list’ address. In Zenbe Mail, your team can set up a mailing list address like ’sales@acmecorp.com’ and have multiple members of the team receive all mail that is sent to that address.

To send email out using either your forwarded or mailing list address, set up a send-only address. Click on “settings”, then “Email Addresses”, followed by the “add an address button”. Next to “Account Type” choose “sends email only.”

After you add the email address, we’ll send a confirmation email in order for you to activate it. It may take a few minutes for the confirmation email to arrive. Once it does, click the activation link. You can start using the address right away by selecting it from the pulldown menu when you compose a new message.

Send and Receive addresses

Some email services don’t support forwarding. Not a problem. You can configure Zenbe Mail to retrieve email from almost any email service. Follow the steps described above to add a new email address, but this time select “sends and receives email” next to the “Account Type” field. You’ll need to give us your email address and password. Note that we store all passwords using industry-standard encryption so you’re credentials are safe with us.

We can auto-detect the correct server settings for many popular email services. If we can’t figure out how to connect to your service, you’ll see an error message asking you to add more information about the server settings. Consult the help documentation provided by your other email service regarding IMAP or POP access to figure out what values to enter.

Zenbe Mail checks your external accounts once every 5-8 minutes for new messages.

Add Email Addresses

The number of external email addresses you can add varies by plan:

Value Plan: 5
Standard Plan: 10
Premium Plan: 20

We hope you enjoy these latest improvements!

Even after filters and rules got rid of the stuff I didn’t need to see, I used to get more than 200 emails a day. These days I get maybe 20.

Sometimes I feel kind of sad and lonely about it. No one wants to talk to me anymore. I miss the foolish satisfaction in getting through all those emails. Where did they all go?

The emails are gone. The social stuff has moved to Facebook, where I can look at it when I want to be social.

The work stuff has moved to Shareflow. On flows, I stay in touch and interact without “doing” anything. Its effortless.

Leaving my inbox kind of empty.

If you reap vital satisfaction from clearing your inbox, stay away from Shareflow. If you want to be more effective with more people with less effort, then give Shareflow a try.

Scammers are surprisingly creative at devising ways of defrauding you of your money. A recent email scam targets job seekers who post resumes online.

Here’s how it works: the job seeker is offered a position as a “mystery shopper.” They are told to go to a store, purchase a few small items, and fill out a questionnaire to evaluate their experience with the store staff.

The scammer sends a check in advance for much more than the amount of the purchased items. The shopper is instructed to deposit the check into their account, then deduct the cost of the purchased items and the mystery shopping fee and wire the remainder back to the scammer.

The scammers may even suggest that you wait until the check clears before wiring them the money. Kathy Kristof of CBS MoneyWatch writes:

U.S. banking laws demand that the bank give you access to your funds within 5 days. That gives most consumers the mistaken impression that the check has cleared. It hasn’t. If it’s a forgery, it can take weeks – even months – to determine that it’s a fake.

In the same article Kristof writes:

A recent survey by Consumer Federation of America found that one in every three Americans has been approached by someone peddling a fake check. About 2% of those people bite and end up losing between $3,000 and $4,000 on the con.

The good news for Zenbe users is that most of these scam emails are caught by our spam filters and you probably never see them. But if you get one of these emails it’s helpful to understand how these scams work. Go take the fraud test at fakechecks.org to how susceptible you are.

Also beware of any work-at-home offer that purports to send you a “welcome kit” or solicits an initiation fee, particularly if they ask you to wire the money.

To learn more about email scams in-depth, take a look at the Advance-fee fraud topic on Wikipedia.