This Thursday, October 2nd, we’re going to perform maintenance on the Zenbe.com site and have some downtime. The site will be down between 4am and 8am Eastern Time, although if we get the maintenance done sooner we’ll definitely bring everything up earlier.

During this maintenance window we’ll be upgrading some servers as well as introducing some new features. During this time you won’t be able to login to the site nor use external mail clients like Apple Mail or Thunderbird, but you will continue to receive email.

This release will introduce IMAP support and we’ll also enable some alpha testers for our conversation view feature that we’ve been working on.

 I vote in every election, and here in New York City they make it very hard to even figure out when  some minor elections are, and impossible to figure out what you are voting for.  Few people here even realize we vote on judges!

While I vote often, I can’t get excited about it. This South Park episode sums up my attitude, most of the time.

If you haven’t noticed, this American Presidential election seems different. We seem to have two different people, with very different opinions, strategies, and agendas. 

Wherever you stand on the issues you care about, please make  sure you are registered, make sure you do your homework, and be sure to Vote!

Hi everyone! I’m Sam, Zenbe’s new Community Leader. It’s my job to make sure you feel connected to the Zenbe team and what’s going on behind the scenes. I will be helping you on the forums, writing posts with tutorials and interesting ways to use Zenbe, and generally helping you feel more involved. If you’d like to share an idea on how Zenbe can serve you better, or you have a tip you’d like to share, send me an email at [ community ] at [ zenbe.com ]. I’ll look forward to seeing you around and making your Zenbe experience even better!

I forgot to talk about a great new feature in my blog post from last week. You can now access ICal feeds for all of your Zenbe calendars. The ICal format allows you to view your Zenbe calendars in other applications that support it, including Apple ICal for OS X.

To find the ICal URL for your Zenbe calendars, click on the gear icon in the toolbar of the Calendar tab, and click on a calendar name. A dialog will appear that shows the link to the ICal version of your calendar. Simply copy and paste it into whatever external application you want to see your Zenbe events in.

9/22 Update: I forgot to mention we added ability to view your Zenbe Calendars as ICal feeds in this post. See the new blog post on Zenbe support for the ICal format for more details.

Last week we rolled out some new features to the Zenbe Mail product. I’d like to highlight a few here:

“Back to…”

We’ve moved the back functionality out of the toolbar and into the sidebar in the Mail tab. Now you’ll see more information about what you’re going back to so you can better remember your context.

Set an end date for recurring events

You can now set an end date for your recurring events. In the “event details” dialog, under the “Repeat Event” section you’ll see options for choosing an end date:

Edit your alternate email address

We use your alternate email address to send you help on resetting your password if you’ve forgotten it and occasionally other important information. You can now see and edit the alternate email address we have on file for you. Click on the settings link in the upper-right corner of the screen and look for it in the top section of the settings dialog.

Birthday calendars

If you store birthdays for your contacts we’ll now create a “Birthdays” calendar in Zenbe for you to keep track of them. To add a birthday for a contact, edit the contact in your address book.

After the first time you add a birthday for a contact you’ll need to refresh your browser. Then click on the calendar tab and you should see a “Birthdays” calendar when you click on the gear on the right side of the toolbar.

Contact Us Form

If you need to contact us directly, please use the “Contact Us” link on our home page to use the new contact form. We can’t always respond to every inquiry directly but we try to keep up as best we can. Here’s a direct link:

Zenbe Contact Form

Skip Browser Warning

If you use a browser that is not “officially” supported by Zenbe, we display a warning message before you login. Now you can check a box to dismiss this warning message in the future:

Zenbe Goodies

We put together a little page of Goodies we’ve hacked together for people that want more integration of Zenbe into their browser experience. Check out our “Zenbe This” bookmarklet, Webmail Notifier script, and Firefox 3 mailto: protocol handler on the Zenbe Goodies page.

What’s next?

We’re working on a lot of new and interesting features. Here’s a sneak peek at a few things you’ll see rolling in the next several weeks.

IMAP Support

We’re releasing our IMAP server to production sometime next week. We got a lot of great feedback via our alpha testers and have found and fixed several bugs with their help.

Conversation View

We’re starting to alpha test our conversation view feature with a few users. Over the next two to three weeks we’ll be opening up the alpha test to even more users. Click here to sign up to be a conversation view alpha tester.

We’re still making lots of enhancements to the user interface, but here’s a little sneak peek at what a conversation looks like in Zenbe:

SSL Support

We know full SSL support is important to a lot of our users when they read their email. Right now we always make sure any login or password changes are encrypted by your browser. Now we are working to make more and more of the Zenbe Mail experience work completely over the https protocol for those of you who want full encryption for everything you do on Zenbe – starting with reading your email.

Superior Email Organization

We think there are better ways of finding email that’s important to you – without having to create lots of cumbersome rules. We’re working on an innovative UI to allow you to view email from only the people you care about in a single click. We’ll be sharing more details on that feature over the next few weeks.

Better iPhone Lists Integration

Right now Zenbe Lists for IPhone users have to go to a separate web site to manage their lists online. We’re working on making your iPhone lists available in the Lists Quickview within Zenbe Mail so you’ll have seamless access to your lists regardless of where you are logged in.

As always, thank you to all of you who have been using Zenbe, particularly those who have registered for our forums and given us lots of valuable feedback.

The responsiveness of the site should be much better now. We tweaked some options on our web server that allow it to serve connections more efficiently.

One of the side-effects of this server optimization is that it caused a bug with our rich-text email composer in the Safari browser. We’ve temporarily disabled rich-text email editing in Safari until we fix the issue, which we’re estimating at 2-3 days. We’re sorry about the inconvenience. Rich-text email composition still works fine in Firefox and Internet Explorer.

FYI -

We are experiencing some slowness and lags on Zenbe.com right now. We’re currently investigating the issue and hope to have things running smoothly in short order.

Just a quick note that the site maintenance has been completed and Zenbe is up and running.

I’ll write a more detailed blog post today highlighting the changes and giving you more news about what we’re working on in the next few weeks.

If you have any trouble with the Zenbe site, please first try clearing your browser cache. Here’s a link to a page that provides detailed instructions on how to clear your cache in different browsers.

Also, please take advantage of our user forums to check for solutions and report issues. You may also contact us using our new contact form.

Tomorrow we’ll some brief site downtime at 8am Eastern Time while we roll out an upgrade to Zenbe Mail.

We expect the site to be unavailable for only about 10-15 minutes. I’ll post an update here when things are complete.

We’re rolling out some new calendar features including the ability to set an end time to recurring events and to subscribe to ICS feeds of your Zenbe calendars. We’ve also tweaked the navigation a little bit in the mail tab. And we’re introducing a contact form to provide a better way to get in touch with us.

The main focus of the release though is to increase stability with some backend architecture changes we made.

I’ll elaborate more on the new features and what we’re working on next after we complete the upgrade tomorrow morning.

Several users have reported seeing items being duplicated when they sync their lists using the Zenbe Lists iPhone app.  This problem occurs when the sync operation is interrupted – either by the app exiting, or the phone losing network connectivity.  Any new lists or items that you have created may end up being duplicated (you won’t notice this, however, until the next successful sync operation).

Existing items – items that are already on our server – are not expected to have this problem.

We’re working on a solution to the problem, but until then we recommend that after creating new items you take extra care to make sure the next sync operation finishes normally.  Try not to exit the application until the little sync spinner finishes, and try not to do anything that might interrupt the network connection.

Thanks for your patience, and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.