Hey everyone,

We’re looking for Zenbe users who want to alpha test our initial IMAP implementation.

For more details, please see the forum post about our IMAP Alpha Test.

We fixed the problem with the Contacts Importer that caused performance problems yesterday. Import away!

Update 21 Aug 2008: The contacts importer is now enabled.

Due to some problems with our contacts importer we had to temporarily disable it.

We’re working on a fix and will hopefully have a patch out by tomorrow.

We’re sorry for the inconvenience.

I want to give a quick overview of a few policies we’ve implemented related to email. Most of this will not affect the average Zenbe user, but we feel it’s important to publicize in case you run into it. We’ll be integrating this information into our Zenbe Help section soon.

1. If you don’t login to your Zenbe account within 30 days, we will stop checking your non-Zenbe email accounts (Gmail, Yahoo, etc). We will not deactivate your zenbe.com email address and you can still login again whenever you want. Once you login again we’ll start checking your external email.
2. We do not allow you to send emails larger than 10MB. We also don’t allow you to receive emails at your zenbe.com address greater than 10MB.
3. You can only address a maximum of 100 recipients in an individual email.
4. You cannot send .exe files or .zip files that contain .exe files. The reasoning behind this is that people often send .exe attachments or send them in a .zip file to trick people into installing malicious software.
5. You can not send more than a certain number or messages, or send email to more than a certain number of recipients per day. This is to minimize the damage done by spammers. Being a free email service we’ve attracted a fair number of spammers and other troublesome users sending out everything from lottery scams to pet adoption frauds.

   Users like this are a big problem for us because they increase the likelihood that email from all of our users may be blocked by another email service or ISP. We have several methods of detecting email abusers, but as an insurance policy we limit the amount of email that any Zenbe user can send out in a day. If you exceed the restriction, you’ll be temporarily unable to send email.

   Be aware that the only users who have ever hit these quotas (or even come close) were spammers. Legitimate email users should not be affected. However, you may run into this limit if you are trying to do a big email marketing campaign sent from your Zenbe account. If you are an email marketer, there are plenty of services out there for you to use.

We’ve completed the maintenance scheduled for this morning. No new major features to announce. We did make some bug fixes here and there but the main goal of the maintenance was to provide infrastructure support for our conversation view feature we are working on.

A few minor things of note:

• We now notify you when we can’t access one of your external email accounts due to a bad username or password. You’ll see an error message when you log in to Zenbe. This can occur if you change your password for an outside email account but forget to change it in Zenbe.
• We made it easier to copy and paste email addresses from people you receive email from. When viewing a message, click the “show addresses” link and you’ll be able to select the email address with your cursor. Note that if you just want to send that contact an email, use the pulldown menu to the left of their address instead.
• We added an FAQ and enhanced the Zenbe Help section of our site.

We also added a few policies regarding checking POP accounts and sending email. I’ll write a separate blog post today to explain.

We did have an early report of a user having problems composing emails. If you have problems with the new release, please clear your browser cache. In Firefox, go to Tools -> Clear Private Data and make sure the “Cache” option is checked. In IE7 go to Tools > Internet Options > General > Browsing History > Delete… and select the “Delete files…” button under “Temporary Internet Files”.

As always, if you find any bugs or have any suggestions, please participate in the Zenbe Support Forums and let us know. We’re not always able to respond to each email you send to us, or to all the individual forum posts, but we do actively monitor the forums and incorporate user feedback into Zenbe when we can.

On Wednesday morning Zenbe.com will be unavailable starting at 5am Eastern time while we perform system maintenance. We expect the site to be available again by 8am Eastern time.

Zenbe Lists for the iPhone will not be affected.

I’ll post an update here when the site is back up and running.

Good morning,

This weekend we had some problems with our service that handles fetching email from your non-Zenbe accounts. The service failed and unfortunately it failed in a way that our monitoring service did not detect it properly and alert us of the issue in a timely manner.

Service should be restored now and we’re going to be getting some extra server capacity this week to help ensure it does not happen again. We’re also investigating why the monitoring service did not give us an alert.

I apologize for the inconvenience and thank you to all the users that reported the issue in the forums.

This morning we rolled out some enhancements and fixes to our contacts import process.  We know many of you have been frustrated by problems importing your contacts.  We’ve made the import process more robust by improving error handling and expanding the types of contact data that we extract from the external services.  Our Google Contacts importer is even able to pull your contacts avatars right into Zenbe.

We hope these enhancements will make your contacts import experience better.  This is an important part of the app that we will continue to improve on.  Thanks for your patience as we grow.

For any users that continue to have problems importing your Outlook csv files please contact us at feedback at zenbe dot com and we’ll work with you to get your file imported properly.

For our iPhone app users, please be aware that we’ve had a couple reports of people losing their list data when they update the application. This seems to be a problem with the App Store update mechanism. I haven’t seen anything official from apple, but other applications are having the same issue. Here’s some of the reports from the wild:

• http://www.tuaw.com/2008/07/25/data-loss-from-app-store-updates/
• http://www.appletell.com/apple/comment/is-there-an-iphone-app-update-bug/
• http://www.appletell.com/apple/comment/data-loss-from-app-store-updates/

I know this may be too late for most of you, but if you haven’t updated to v1.2, I recommend that you “sync” your data to our servers before updating. Go to lists.zenbe.com to create a free account, then hit the “sync” button in Zenbe Lists and enter your account credentials. If your data is ever lost, it will be restored from the Zenbe servers the next time you sync.

If this post is too-little-too-late for you, I apologize. I’ll post an update here if/when we find a way to recover the lost data.

Also, the MacBreak Weekly podcast, Episode #100, [iTunes link, about 28:30 in] mentions that updating and restoring apps via iTunes may avoid a variety of issues that occur when using the App Store in the iPhone.

We’re very pleased to announce that the latest version of our iPhone app, Zenbe Lists v1.2, just hit the App Store.

This is the first version where we’ve had a chance to start incorporating the great feedback you folks have given us.  Feature-wise things aren’t too different, although we’ve added a couple of little things. Most of the work has been in “housekeeping”. We’ve been cleaning up some of the more insidious bugs, and tweaking the usability of things a bit for the better. Here are the blow-by-blow details …

Bugs that were fixed:

• Last item in long lists not being visible
• Passwords with ‘&’ or ‘+’ not recognized
• Done/cancel buttons sometimes fail to appear when editing item description
• Item summary cleared when date picker opened.
• Crash when current list removed during sync
• New items sometimes not positioned properly
• Various UI bugs in landscape mode
• Allow lists with empty names

New Features:

• List of lists can now be reordered
• info button for more information about the app
• Settings: Move checked items (on by default)
• Settings: Sync on launch (on by default)
• Settings: Enable landscape mode (on by default)
• Settings: Display build info
• Settings: a couple of “advanced” options I don’t want you messing with.
• Improved network awareness
• Display version info in splash panel and settings

Enjoy!