Conversation and Favorites View
November 20th, 2008 by Tom Alison · comments · http://blog.zenbe.com/pjponGreetings blog readers! This was an exciting week here at Zenbe. We released two great new features: Conversation View and Favorites View:
Conversation View
Conversation View allows you to see all email messages related to a particular conversation with a single-click. To enable conversation view, click on the conversation icon in the mail toolbar:
Once you toggle Conversation View on, you’ll see a count of the number of emails associated with each conversation in your message listing:
Once you open the message, any unread messages in the conversation will be expanded, but you can easily go back and expand any previous messages to get a full history of the conversation.
Try it out! If you don’t like it, you can always go back to a regular message listing by toggling the icon in the mail toolbar.
Favorites View
In a previous blog post I explained how you can designate certain contacts as Favorites. Just open the Address Book on the right-side of the screen, and add a blue start next to your Favorite contacts:
Whenever your Inbox is overloaded with messages, just click on the Favorites link in the mail sidebar and only messages in your Inbox from your favorite contacts will be shown:
It’s a great way to see your most important email at the beginning of the day or after coming back from vacation without having to fuss around with rules.
Media Coverage
This week we got a lot of nice media coverage. In case you missed it, check out the articles by Mashable, Techcrunch, Ars Technica and MakeUseOf.
We’re Out of Beta
Yay, we’re out of Beta! What does that mean? Well, first and foremost it means the word “beta” is not next to our logo. But we did more than that. We redesigned zenbe.com to do a better job highlighting the unique features we offer. And we opened signup to anyone who wants an account.
Some of you have said, “Hey I signed up for Zenbe but never got my signup confirmation email!” In most cases, you’ll get an email confirming your signup in 24 hours. However, as a free webmail provider we take extreme precautions to prevent people from signing up for our service to send spam. We try to control the flow of the number of signups and where people are signing up from to prevent spam outbreaks we’ve experienced in the past. So if you haven’t received your confirmation yet, please bear with us – we’re working on it.
Nominate Us for a Crunchie
Do you love using Zenbe? If so, nominate us for a Techcrunch Crunchie award. We’d love your support in the “Best Design” or “Best New Startup of 2008″ category.
Tom & the rest of the Zenbe team,
Congrats on moving out of Beta. I was happy to nominate your for a Crunchie. I really enjoy the way Zenbe is designed and the way it works. Along the way, you’ve been able to add functionality without FUBARing the site. The new Favorites view, for example, is simple genius. I’m also impressed with the Zenbe team’s responsiveness to user input.
I look forward to seeing what you guys do next with this.
Still needs an option to disable loading of remote images in messages (many spammers use this to verify a new email in their spam list) and better support to foreign characters in messages (UTF-8, ISO-8859-1, etc).
Other than that, great job. Congrats! =)
GREAT!!!:)
Sounds like conversation view will get rid of inbox clutter quite a bit. Oh and congrats coming out of Beta, that’s good news for all of us.
I think submitting this fantastic web app for review at even more websites would boost the public image and probably gain it a lot of momentum. Heck, maybe you could even get this app used by default with some sort of Linux distribution…
great functionality but i think that having the switch (Conversation View ON/OFF) in the main GUI is a mistake
it looks like an option for advanced users then put it in Settings
i suggest that Zenbe uses Conversation View as default and provides an option to disable it in Setting instead of the current implementation.
Besides, metaphores for the switch icons are not perfectly clear (tooltips are necessary in this case) whereas words in Settings would be clearer
I love the favourites view! You rock!
Speaking of foreign languages, is support for right-to-left text coming any time soon? (You do realise I’m not talking about alignment…? It leaves punctuation on the wrong side – at the beginning, on the right – which is particularly confusing with brackets and such like.) Please take it into account!
I am sure everyone understands the need to be proactive about spam. But I also noticed that in order to have an email address, you must first verify an alternate email address. I have always wondered about this because if a particular service is a person’s FIRST email address at all, then what is that person to do? To my knowledge, only Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo and maybe a small handful of others allow you to sign up without an alternate email address. My point is that spam prevention is a good thing but extremes in anything are never good (i.e. allowing all spam to go through vs. making it so difficult to sign up that people who prefer the service can’t even get an email address that they want).
@Nick,
I agree that extremes are never good. Our original process extreme in the sense that it was ridiculously easy to sign up for an account. We let anyone sign up without requiring verification of an alternate email address. BIG mistake. The result: Spammers were setting up accounts in the hundreds.
Next we decided to require confirmation of an alternate email address. Spammers got around that too. We had a situation where a spam-based “marketing” company in Dubai hired low-wage workers in the Philippines to set up hundreds of Zenbe accounts in a single day and blast school teachers all over the United States with a promotion for a fake conference. The result: Email from all Zenbe users started to get blocked by mail servers that handled email for schools.
When spammers use Zenbe to send spam, it really screws over all of our users because our email sending reputation goes down, making it more likely that legitimate Zenbe users don’t have their email delivered to the Inbox. So we’ve had to make a trade-off: a) Give anyone an account but redirect a lot of our engineering efforts to preventing internal spammers from abusing the system or b) Be a little tougher on screening accounts and allow us to continue focusing on innovating email.
It’s not an easy trade-off. But as a comparison, when I got a Gmail account back in 2004 I had to be invited. There was no “signup” for Gmail back then. And it stayed invite-only for a long-time. Then, when they “opened” it up, you needed a cell phone for them to send you an SMS activation code. That was the only way you could get a Gmail account for years.
I used to think that was all kind of silly. But now I appreciate why. When you offer free email, you have to work very hard to protect your service from people using it for fraudulent purposes. One day I’ll write a blog post about some of the abuse we’ve seen, because some of the things people try to do would be hilarious if it weren’t so frustrating to try to combat.
For now, the irony is that in order for our service to grow in a healthy way we actually have to place more restrictions than we’d like on signing up for an account.
I’ve tried them all. Zenbe…terrific. We’re on a winner!
Favorites view would be awesome if it had a counter like my regular email does. I don’t click on email I don’t want to read. I don’t even bother deleting it – I just ignore it. I end up with thousands of unread emails over a few months because of this.
Favorites is a great way to circumvent this issue, but I never know when I have a new message from a favorite contact. I never check it, making it effectively useless. Please add some sort of notification if there is unread favorite email.
Good job guys. With some work, favorites could be the new inbox, and inbox could be the new spam. =)
@Tom
A first-hand account of the development of Zenbe, including the frustration with spammers, would be an interesting read. Have you ever read “Soul of a New Machine” by Tracy Kidder? It’s a first-hand account of the development of a new mainframe. Good stuff.
Hi,
I love your email, but it does not work on my iphone…, I cannot sign in, every time it quits and returns to the main screen after about 1-2 minutes. I really want to check my email from my phone, you should make an iphone zenbe email application, or at least make it so it can use the iphone safari browser.
please please please…,
thanks,
Ryan
i love the new conversation view but it’s having trouble updating properly.
whilst in conversation view, if the left menu shows my inbox has a message, the conversation display isn’t updated and doesn’t show this new, unread message.
i user camino Version 1.6.5 (1.8.1.18 2008111212) as my web browser on a Mac OS X leopard 10.5.4
any tips?
Hi I am the user of Zenbe. I like to explore the world of Internet, (yes! it is vast), but I find zenbe very nice with a look and exposure to other e-mail service providers. This is great and I am enjoying Zennbe…… Once again …. three cheers for ZENBE….. Hip… Hip ….. Hurrray…. Have a nice time when ever you visit this page. GOD BLESSES ALL OF US
Hi,
conversation view is a really cool feature. I’ve just discovered a problem concerning replies written with German email clients. Those clients, especially Outlook, change the Stadard “RE:” to “AW:” or “FWD:” to “WG:”. Would it be possible to take care of those issues?