Before the public release of our Beta free email service last spring, we debated the path Zenbe should take first. Should we offer a free webmail service for consumers, or a paid subscription service for businesses?

As a reader of this blog, you know which path we chose first.

After our last major release in November, we have been working hard on the other path. Zenbe for Business will be open for business in February.  You can point your domain’s email and use it with Zenbe, or create a subdomain like cornerdeli.zenbe.com. It will offer many of the advantages of Zenbe Personal (the free service you use now). Zenbe for Business will perform better, and have some great new features as well, including our new take on collaboration.

Of course we are going to keep offering and maintaining Zenbe Personal.  We hope to push a new release out over the next couple of months, packed with enhancements and improvements.  So stay tuned!

Update (1/15 10:42am Eastern):

We’re currently restoring messages from secondary storage. Some metadata regarding the read/unread state and tags may be lost in the restore. So you may notice your Inbox counts go up in response to older messages being restored. The restore will happen over the course of the day and you should be able to access your content again by this afternoon.

Update (1/14 1:30pm Eastern):

Our IMAP server has been re-enabled. All messages not affected by the situation described below are available via IMAP.

Update (1/14 11:00am Eastern):

Our data center technicians discovered that one of primary file storage nodes has failed. This storage node held email data from POP accounts that we retrieved between 12/29 and 1/12. Any email addressed to your zenbe.com account was not affected.

We’ve been working continuously to try to recover the data from the primary node, but we are now shifting gears to restore the email content from our secondary backup archival node. Unfortunately this could take us several hours today. We will provide timely updates as to our progress in this blog post.

As mentioned previously, because this problem only affects POP messages from non-Zenbe accounts, as a workaround you can login to your external account to view the message. Zenbe never deletes messages from your external email accounts so you should still have a copy there.

Yesterday afternoon we took down our IMAP servers as they were behaving strangely in response to the missing files. We are working on restoring IMAP this morning. Some IMAP clients may behave strangely, but we are performing testing so we can let you know what to expect.

Again, we apologize for the inconvenience. We design all of our storage systems to be fault-tolerant. Unfortunately we experienced an abnormal malfunction of the storage hardware that we are working with the data center technicians to diagnose.

All POP email received after January 12th should be functioning normally.