Zenbe is a big project.

We started with email, and we are hardly done yet.

Then we added a calendar, and of course we needed files view… and zenpages seemed like a good idea. We wanted great search, tags, and rules. Then we needed quickviews on the right, we added a bunch of those, and someday you will be able to create your own…

So when it came to writing our home page, we were forced to edit down. Did we do the best job explaining why Zenbe is so great?  Hmmm….

Thousands of people have been using Zenbe, and you must have some good reasons for doing so.  Can you describe them in a nutshell? What do you tell your friends?  What would you put on our home page?

Post your ideas in our forum!

http://forums.zenbe.com/topic/258

…and thanks for using Zenbe!

My favorite new feature has finally made its way out the door – keyboard shortcuts. We’re still working on a full set of shortcuts, but we didn’t think you’d mind if we rolled out what we have so far. The available shortcuts can be found here: http://forums.zenbe.com/topic/221.

Be sure to let us know which ones you like or dislike, and which ones you feel are still missing.

We just rolled out a new feature that can help you process your email more efficiently. When you roll your mouse over an email address while viewing a message in Zenbe, you’ll notice that it becomes buttonized. Clicking this button will give you a list of common tasks that you can perform on the selected email address.

You can: create or view a contact associated with the email address; compose a new email to the email address; search your mail for other messages to or from the email address; or create a new email rule based on the email address.

Here’s one example of how this feature can speed things up for you…

I’m going out of town this weekend and I just received my travel itinerary. I’d like to categorize all messages from JetBlue reservations as travel, add a star and forward a copy to my wife. Here’s how I can use the new context menu to create a rule to do this for me…

Just mouse over the email address and select “create a rule”

The rule criteria are already setup for me, so I just need to add some actions to take.

Let us know what you think about this new feature. We really appreciate your feedback!

We rolled out a small new feature this morning that we hope you’ll enjoy. When you open your Zenbe Address Book you may see some photos for contacts that you did not upload yourself. We’ve integrated the Gravatar service with the Zenbe Address Book. Gravatar allows you to associate a picture with an email address. If you are seeing a new picture of your friend in your address book, it means he/she has a setup a Gravatar picture for the email address you have for them in the address book entry.

You can add your own Gravatar for your Zenbe account or any other email account here. Then your friends will be able to see your avatar in their address book automatically too.

You can still choose to set your own picture for your friends that have Gravatars by clicking on the pencil icon in the address book entry edit mode and uploading an alternate picture.

First I like to thank our beta users. All your feedbacks and warm wishes for us are greatly appreciated. For those still in our queue waiting for an invite, we’re working hard to send out more invites. It should not be too long before we get to you.

As my way of saying thanks, I like to share with you an undocumented feature in Zenbe. It is known as plus addressing. Let say your email address is JohnSmith@zenbe.com, you can add a plus behind your user name with some other word and it is still a valid email address for you. Example, JohnSmith+shopping@zenbe.com, or JohnSmith+mailingList@zenbe.com. This is very useful to give different addresses when signing up mailing lists or e-commerce sites. It allows you to easily search or write a rule to handle those emails differently than your normal emails.

At Zenbe, we not only support plus addressing, we go one step further and auto tag it with the word behind the plus for you. So in the two examples above emails to those addresses will be automatically tagged shopping and mailingList respectively.

I hope you find this useful. Thanks again for all your wonderful support.

Cheers.

We designed Zenbe so that you would have a lot of information at your fingertips while reading your email. One of the features that helps you do this is the Quickview on the right side of the screen. It allows you to glance at your agenda, contacts, todo lists, or even your Facebook friends without disrupting your main activity while continuing to read your email.

Consequently, Zenbe works best on a screen with a resolution of at least 1024×768. But here’s a tip for using Zenbe on smaller screen sizes – like your laptop – and avoid getting an unpleasant horizontal scroll bar. Simply collapse the Quickview on the right side of the screen by clicking on >> arrows in the gray tab:

Once you click the arrows – Voila! – the Quickview closes and you have more room to view the content in the main tab:

If you need to access anything in the Quickview, just click the arrows again to reopen it.

The Never Ending Internet has a great post on Zenbe that mentions this and many of our other features. Hop over there and check it out.

We just recently put up some forum software over at http://forums.zenbe.com to allow Zenbe users to give us feedback.

If you have a feature request, found a bug, or have a question, please stop by.

You need to create a separate account on the forums to post a message – registration is separate from your zenbe.com account. But you can browse the forums without an account.

Come try it out!

Update: There was a problem with the forums before due to some plugins not being activated. Things should be working much better now. Thanks Mike for reporting the issue!

Tomorrow morning our systems will be offline from 6-7:30am Eastern time so we can do some maintenance. Hopefully the maintenance will be less than an hour long, but we’ve scheduled it for an hour just in case.

Sorry about the inconvenience but we’re adding some capacity so we can invite more beta users.

We want to thank everyone for their feedback, videos, poetry, support and enthusiasm for Zenbe.

We read, watch, and otherwise consume all of it. Thanks.

We have started on a long path that includes many of the enhancements people are asking for, and your feedback helps us to get to the more important stuff faster. And of course we are excited to add ideas we didn’t think of.

So keep that feedback coming. And thanks again, very very much.

PS: We want to make a few little tweaks, and in a few days we will start sending out more invites to the thousands who expressed an interest in Zenbe.