Comments on: Conversation and Favorites View

By: Martin

Martin — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 14:37:51 +0000

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?

By: Kunal Hindalekar

Kunal Hindalekar — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 11:24:46 +0000

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

By: carla

carla — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 16:10:06 +0000

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?

By: Ryan Meyers

Ryan Meyers — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 04:48:07 +0000

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

By: YeaWright

YeaWright — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 01:28:33 +0000

@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.

By: Brenton

Brenton — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 21:12:24 +0000

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. =)

By: Kev

Kev — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 10:14:01 +0000

I’ve tried them all. Zenbe…terrific. We’re on a winner!

By: Tom Alison

Tom Alison — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 16:19:05 +0000

@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.

By: Nick

Nick — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 07:05:55 +0000

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).

By: Inbal

Inbal — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 20:43:04 +0000

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!