We rolled out some new features to zenbe.com yesterday. Here’s a breakdown of what’s new:

Better File Previews - Including Audio and Video

Did you know that you could preview file attachments without even opening the email? Click on the attachment icon in the email message listing and you’ll get a dialog box like the one below. You can tag, download, delete, star and even edit the name of the file. All of your changes will be reflected in the Files tab. You can also click on the image and get a larger preview. 

You can also preview audio and video files right within Zenbe:

More Powerful File Attacher

When you attach a file to an email message, you can either upload a new file or choose one that you already have on Zenbe. Finding files to send as attachments that are already on Zenbe just got easier. Now you can search and filter your files in the attacher to quickly find the file you want to send.

Attachment Thumbnails

When you add attachments to an email you can now see thumbnails of the attachments you’re adding. This is a great way to preview the pictures you’re sending:

When you open an email with attachments in it, we’ll show you thumbnails of each of the attachments. Click on any of the thumbnails to get a file preview where you can do more:

If you don’t want to see the thumbnails, just click on the arrow to collapse them.

Basic Signature Support

You can now set a signature on all your outbound emails. Click on “settings” in the upper-right corner and then add your signature text to the Signature field. Your signature will show up at the bottom of the email composer when you create a new message.

International Calendar Options

You can now specify different date and time formats in the main calendar. Go to the Calendar tab, click on the settings icon on the right hand side of the toolbar, and click on “Time + Date Options”. Your settings will take effect when you refresh your browser.

Better Rules and Accounts UI

In the Mail tab, click on the settings icon on the far-right side of the toolbar to access your external email accounts and to create and edit rules. This icon replaces the “Manage Mail and Rules” button that used to be under your tags in the left-hand sidebar.

An Easier Way to Search By Tag

Click the pulldown arrow next to the search field in the mail tab. When you hover over the “tag:” menu item you’ll get a list of your tags that you can click on to easily search by tag. You can click on one tag or on multiple tags to construct a search.

Package Tracking

When you open an email with a package tracking code from UPS, FedEx, DHL or USPS we’ll link that code to the site where you can view detailed package tracking information.

New Users: Resend Your Confirmation Email

Some new users have told us they have not received their confirmation email, or they accidentally entered an incorrect alternate email address. If you are a new user, you can now login to the site and elect to resend the email confirmation or change the address to which the confirmation is sent.

More Ways To Add Users to a Network

Networks allow you to group contacts in order to email multiple people at once and keep your address book organized. You can now add a user to a Network simply by hovering over their name in an open email and choosing “add to network…”

“Zenbe This” Bookmarklet

We’ve created a “Zenbe This” bookmarklet that you can drag to your browser bookmark toolbar. When you click on the bookmarklet it will open up a email composition window in Zenbe with a link to the current page you are viewing. It makes it super simple to send links to yourself or to your friends.

To install, drag the link below to your browser’s bookmark toolbar.

Zenbe This

What’s Next?

We’re getting ready to do an internal alpha test of our conversation view and IMAP server. Hopefully we’ll be able to offer this to our Beta users a bit later this summer.

Also watch for version 1.2 of Zenbe Lists for the iPhone which fixes many of the bugs users have reported on the forums.

We’re also fixing bugs, particularly with the contacts importer, and working on new user interfaces to make it easier to find email from the people that are most important to you.

Thanks again to all the users who continue to give us feedback. Sometimes we can’t respond to everything, but we are listening and incorporating many of your great suggestions. 

FYI -

Zenbe.com is back up and running normally. The system upgrade was completed. We rolled out a bunch of nice little feature enhancements that I’ll describe in detail in my next blog post which should be up within a day (it’s going to take me a little while to get all the screenshots together).

If you find any bugs or issues, please report them on http://forums.zenbe.com or send an email to feedback at zenbe dot com.

We’ll be doing a planned system upgrade this weekend on Sunday morning between 8am and 10am Eastern Time.

The Zenbe.com site may be unavailable during this time. Zenbe Lists should be unaffected.

I’ll post back here when we are online again.

We’ll be rolling out a few feature enhancements, defect fixes and some infrastructure changes required to support future projects. I’ll post more details here after the upgrade is complete.

Good news, Apple has approved v1.1 of our iPhone Lists app!  Before you get too excited, know that we submitted this version to the App Store on July 7th, before we had any of the outstanding feedback everyone has been sending in.  Sadly, this means that none of the bugs that have been driving you (and us) crazy have  been fixed yet.  Instead, it’s just a minor update for…

• Simpler “share” emails - we’ve simplified the verbage contained in emails that are sent when sharing a list with someone.
• Now using the correct server name for share links.
• Various UI tweaks and improvements - nothing too notable.

We’re already looking forward to getting v1.2 out there for you to play with.  Look forward to a batch of new features and fixes for bugs, including the now infamous “can’t see the last item” bug.

In other news, we’ve learned the hard way that you need to be really careful what you put in your Terms of Service.  The most popular (and therefore, first) comment on our App Store page is the one that provides an out-of-context (and now obsolete) quote from the section on, “Your Intellectual Property Rights”.  I’ll be the first to admit it sounds pretty scary, but it was intended simply to make sure we had the right to copy and publish your content in ways necessary to do all the stuff you’ve come to expect of Zenbe: backup your data, make content you share available to the people you want to share it with… that sort of thing.  Regardless, we’ve updated our Terms to be less threatening, so hopefully there’s longer any cause for concern.

While it’s unfortunate that this is the first comment users see for our app, I can’t tell you how pleased we are at all the nice things everyone has had to say about us.  This has been a great first week for us and the praise and feedback has been a real moreal booster.  So, “Thanks!”

I’m proud to announce that we’ve launched a new service, “Zenbe Lists”. Zenbe Lists allows you to quickly create lists of items and share them with your friends  We’ve built two great ways to access the service.  For starters, there’s lists.zenbe.com, our best-of-breed web interface that can be used from anywhere to access and manage your lists.  When you share a list with someone, they get to use this same interface, even if they don’t have a Zenbe account .

But it gets better!  We’ve built a snazzy-yet-simple iPhone app.  Just install the “Zenbe Lists” app on your iPhone directly by searching for Zenbe in the App Store or from the Zenbe Lists iTunes page (requires iTunes).

When you share a list with someone they don’t need an iphone, they don’t even need a Zenbe account.  For example, check out my “Items For Everyone” list.  Just click the link and *bingo* you’re viewing (and editing) my list. Pretty cool, huh!

Like our webmail service, Zenbe Lists is free.  You can use your existing Zenbe account to login or create a new account to get started.  To find out more watch the demo video or visit the Zenbe Lists Forum.

(P.S. We’ve been getting tons of great early feedback, which we really appreciate. Lots of great feature requests and bug reports.  I’ll be posting a FAQ in the forums soon to cover the most common requests and issues we’re seeing.  Thanks for all the great support!)

Good morning,

Search functionality is working normally again. Thank you for your patience and enjoy your weekend!

This morning we’re having problems with one of our machines that hosts some of our search indices.

Consequently, some search functionality may be unavailable as we’re fixing the problem. Certain searches, like “from:bob” or “to:sandy” will still work. However, keyword searches like “fireworks” or complex searches with multiple conditions will come back with an error.

We’re working on the problem and I apologize for the inconvenience.

There was a Lifehacker post today about Gmail’s ability to tag outgoing emails by rules.  The usage example in the article that was most interesting to me was a rule that searches for a keyword like “Request” in any outgoing email’s subject and tagging it “Waiting for” to mark it as something I’m expecting a reply.  This is useful to many of us who sends out many emails in a day, and it is very hard to keep track of the ones I don’t get a reply back and need to follow up again.

However, using a rule to look for a specific keyword that I have to include in my subject line seems like a round about way to mark an email as expecting a reply.  What if I can’t work the word “Request” into the email subject?  Or my subject contains the word Request, but I’m not waiting for anything back.  In Zenbe we’ve an easier solution.  You can simply tag any outgoing email before you send it.  Zenbe provides a tagging mechanism in our compose window.  That’s where I can add my “ExpectReply” tag to any outgoing emails I am expecting a response.

In additional to it being a good way to organize your outgoing emails, those tags can optionally be sent along with the email.  If the receiver is another Zenbe user, those outgoing tags will be visible for the receiver reading the message as Suggested Tags.  For example, I can tag emails I’m sending to the Zenbe team, UIDesign, Bugs, or Features.

Suggested Tags are potentially a helpful time saving tool because it allows one person to help others tagging their emails.  If a circle of friends or co-workers all tag their relevant outgoing emails, then we share the load of organizing our inboxes.  We all know keeping emails filed correctly with tags is a time consuming task.  If I send out a message about a work project to 10 people, why should those 10 people have to spend more than a second to accept my Suggested Tag.  By taking a little time to tag my outgoing emails, not only am I organizing my own emails, I’m also helping receivers of that email organize it.

We at Zenbe understand in today’s world of multi-gigabyte mailboxes, the ability to find something in your mailbox quickly and easily is of utmost importance.  Which is why Zenbe provides an extensive set of features including a rich Advanced Search UI  and Filtering mechanism.  They are powerful yet user friendly tools to locate information.

However, for the expert users the most powerful search tool might be the simple search box.   I use it everyday, and today I like to share with you the secrets of our search syntax.

Search Terms

A search is made up of one or more search terms separated by spaces. Terms containing a space must be wrapped in double quotes. E.g.,

“new york”
“pedro martinez”

By default, terms are joined by the AND operator. Valid term operators are AND, OR, and NOT (not case sensitive). NOT binds before AND. AND binds before OR.  There are special terms we call tokens.  Valid tokens are:

• from:
• to: (searches to, cc, and bcc fields)
• cc:
• subject:
• tag: (searches both system & user tags)
• body:
• before:  (date)
• after:  (date)
• viewed:  (true or false)
• has_attachments: (true or false)

Here are some example of searches using tokens:

• sidebar tag:zenbe  (This searches for all emails containing the word sidebar tagged zenbe)
• tag:accountant  (This searches for all emails tagged accountant)
• from:alan  (This searches for all emails from sender alan)
• tag:”new york” from:”pedro martinez”  (Searches for emails tagged new york from sender Pedro Martinez)
• tag:zenbe -from:peter  (returns emails tagged zenbe that are not from peter)
• (from:peter or from:alan) viewed:false  (return emails from either peter or alan that are unviewed)
• -(from:peter or from:alan) tag:design  (return emails from anyone besides peter and alan tagged design)
• before:6-25-2007  (return emails from before 6-25-2007)

In the example with the term -from:peter, it is the same as NOT from:peter.  A ‘-’ before a token negates the meaning.

System Tags

The following tags are special system tags (as opposed to user-created tags):

• tag:Inbox
• tag:Starred
• tag:Drafts
• tag:Sent
• tag:Spam
• tag:Deleted
• tag:Archive
• tag:Unread

These system tags allow you to easily search in your Inbox or Sent emails, etc.  The system tag names has to be capitalized.  Here are some example uses:

• tag:Inbox tag:Unread
• (tag:Spam OR tag:Deleted) “some missing email”

The first example will return any Unread emails in the inbox, and the second example will return any emails in the Spam or Deleted tags that contain the phrase “some missing email”  I hope this blog post will help you make the most out of the very powerful search engine underneat the Zenbe hood.  Enjoy.