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.

We rolled out some new features to zenbe.com yesterday. Here’s a breakdown of what’s new:

Better File Previews - Including Audio and Video

Did you know that you could preview file attachments without even opening the email? Click on the attachment icon in the email message listing and you’ll get a dialog box like the one below. You can tag, download, delete, star and even edit the name of the file. All of your changes will be reflected in the Files tab. You can also click on the image and get a larger preview. 

You can also preview audio and video files right within Zenbe:

More Powerful File Attacher

When you attach a file to an email message, you can either upload a new file or choose one that you already have on Zenbe. Finding files to send as attachments that are already on Zenbe just got easier. Now you can search and filter your files in the attacher to quickly find the file you want to send.

Attachment Thumbnails

When you add attachments to an email you can now see thumbnails of the attachments you’re adding. This is a great way to preview the pictures you’re sending:

When you open an email with attachments in it, we’ll show you thumbnails of each of the attachments. Click on any of the thumbnails to get a file preview where you can do more:

If you don’t want to see the thumbnails, just click on the arrow to collapse them.

Basic Signature Support

You can now set a signature on all your outbound emails. Click on “settings” in the upper-right corner and then add your signature text to the Signature field. Your signature will show up at the bottom of the email composer when you create a new message.

International Calendar Options

You can now specify different date and time formats in the main calendar. Go to the Calendar tab, click on the settings icon on the right hand side of the toolbar, and click on “Time + Date Options”. Your settings will take effect when you refresh your browser.

Better Rules and Accounts UI

In the Mail tab, click on the settings icon on the far-right side of the toolbar to access your external email accounts and to create and edit rules. This icon replaces the “Manage Mail and Rules” button that used to be under your tags in the left-hand sidebar.

An Easier Way to Search By Tag

Click the pulldown arrow next to the search field in the mail tab. When you hover over the “tag:” menu item you’ll get a list of your tags that you can click on to easily search by tag. You can click on one tag or on multiple tags to construct a search.

Package Tracking

When you open an email with a package tracking code from UPS, FedEx, DHL or USPS we’ll link that code to the site where you can view detailed package tracking information.

New Users: Resend Your Confirmation Email

Some new users have told us they have not received their confirmation email, or they accidentally entered an incorrect alternate email address. If you are a new user, you can now login to the site and elect to resend the email confirmation or change the address to which the confirmation is sent.

More Ways To Add Users to a Network

Networks allow you to group contacts in order to email multiple people at once and keep your address book organized. You can now add a user to a Network simply by hovering over their name in an open email and choosing “add to network…”

“Zenbe This” Bookmarklet

We’ve created a “Zenbe This” bookmarklet that you can drag to your browser bookmark toolbar. When you click on the bookmarklet it will open up a email composition window in Zenbe with a link to the current page you are viewing. It makes it super simple to send links to yourself or to your friends.

To install, drag the link below to your browser’s bookmark toolbar.

Zenbe This

What’s Next?

We’re getting ready to do an internal alpha test of our conversation view and IMAP server. Hopefully we’ll be able to offer this to our Beta users a bit later this summer.

Also watch for version 1.2 of Zenbe Lists for the iPhone which fixes many of the bugs users have reported on the forums.

We’re also fixing bugs, particularly with the contacts importer, and working on new user interfaces to make it easier to find email from the people that are most important to you.

Thanks again to all the users who continue to give us feedback. Sometimes we can’t respond to everything, but we are listening and incorporating many of your great suggestions. 

I’m proud to announce that we’ve launched a new service, “Zenbe Lists”. Zenbe Lists allows you to quickly create lists of items and share them with your friends  We’ve built two great ways to access the service.  For starters, there’s lists.zenbe.com, our best-of-breed web interface that can be used from anywhere to access and manage your lists.  When you share a list with someone, they get to use this same interface, even if they don’t have a Zenbe account .

But it gets better!  We’ve built a snazzy-yet-simple iPhone app.  Just install the “Zenbe Lists” app on your iPhone directly by searching for Zenbe in the App Store or from the Zenbe Lists iTunes page (requires iTunes).

When you share a list with someone they don’t need an iphone, they don’t even need a Zenbe account.  For example, check out my “Items For Everyone” list.  Just click the link and *bingo* you’re viewing (and editing) my list. Pretty cool, huh!

Like our webmail service, Zenbe Lists is free.  You can use your existing Zenbe account to login or create a new account to get started.  To find out more watch the demo video or visit the Zenbe Lists Forum.

(P.S. We’ve been getting tons of great early feedback, which we really appreciate. Lots of great feature requests and bug reports.  I’ll be posting a FAQ in the forums soon to cover the most common requests and issues we’re seeing.  Thanks for all the great support!)

There are many articles being written about email overload these days, and as many articles on how to deal it.  Most productivity experts generally agree there are two solutions: 1. Don’t get interrupted so often; deal with emails in scheduled time blocks.  2. Handle email in a systematic way, like using GTD.  But they don’t talk much about what email clients can do to help. In fact, many recommend against using the automation features found in most email clients. 

Why should we not use the computer in front of us to help?  After all, computers are supposed to be productivity tools.  I think the main reason is because email clients were designed long ago, in an era when people got far fewer emails in a day.  Not much has changed in email client designs in decades and they simply lack the features.  We need modern tools to deal with modern problems.  Gmail’s conversation view is a great example of a modern addition to reduce the number of messages in our inbox.  But unfortunately the only one in a long time.  Today I will introduce you to the first set of tools we have in Zenbe to help with the battle against email overload.

Background

Before I get into any specific Zenbe features, I want to quickly examine why methodologies, like GTD, are so hard to stick with over time, and why automation features, like rules and filters as they stand today, are of little use in this fight. I’ve been using email for a long time and I’ve tried all the different ways, but none of them were very effective or satisfying for me.  Even with my best effort, sooner or later my inbox gets overwhelmed, and I’m back to making another new year’s resolution to clean up my inbox.  I’m not alone in my failure to tame my inbox because it is quite fashionable these days to declare email bankruptcy. 

In methodologies like GTD, or its variants, the strategy is to use only a handful of folders or tags to organize messages by actions.  All incoming emails in the inbox are sorted by hand into one of the few action buckets.  I have to look at each piece of email and decide what to do with them.  I have to sort through the family emails that are interleaved with important work emails.  Once they are sorted and I’ve acted upon them, I have to file them away one more time.  I believe their achillies’ heel is that they are extremely labor intensive.  It is so exhausting to keep up, most of us fall off the wagon sooner or later.  (Kudos to those with enough will power, and time, to stick with it for the long haul) 

As for why auto-filing emails using rules is little better, once emails are filed into their various folders, it takes a long time to check all your folders to find new messages.  The more folders one has, the bigger this problem becomes, which is why most methodologies say “don’t use more than a few folders”.  The guilt inducing counter next to each folder is useless when it comes to notifying us of newly arrived emails because the counter going from 308 to 309 is meaningless to people without a photographic memory.  Also because out of sight is out of mind.  Emails auto filed in a folder are generally left forgotten. 

So, while I agree the automation tools available up to now don’t help very much, I also believe there’s a hybrid solution that actually works.  By taking the best ideas of the methodologies, mixing in a good dose of automation, enabling it all with a few simple client features, Zenbe has a practical and common sense way to help win the fight against bulging inboxes and forgotten emails.

Meet the New Sidebar

We introduced a new look to the mail sidebar today.  It is cleaner and more functional than before.  The two key features that are the enablers to the Zenbe way of managing the inbox are: The Unviewed Flag, and a Reorganizable Tags list.  They are designed to address the specific short comings of auto-tagging using rules and make it easier to stick with a systematic program like GTD.

Let’s start with the unviewed flag, it is the little gray box behind the Inbox and Boss tag unread counter in the image to the left.  That gray box appears when there is new email in that tag.  In this case, there are new message from my Boss and in the Inbox.  It is very easy to see at a glance which tag has new email.  For users of many feed readers, the concept of unviewed should be familiar.  We added this concept because it addresses one of the biggest complains about auto-tagging that I mentioned above.  Without the unviewed flag, it is impossible to see at a glance which tag has new emails.  With the unviewed flag, you can safely auto-tag emails and keep them out of your inbox without missing them.  Some might say it is still inefficient, instead of checking the single inbox for all your new messages, now they’ve to check many tags to see all their new emails.

That is exactly the point.  Remember one of the experts’ advice is to not check emails too often?  The short coming of that advice has always been the possibility of missing the really important email between scheduled email time blocks.  So I like to modify that advice to say, “Don’t check unimportant messages too often”.  This will not reduce interruptions as much as strict adherence to a time schedule, but it is more practicable for someone living in the modern world.  For example, if we can auto-tag emails from a hobby mailing list, family, and work, we can then decide I’ll only look at the mailing list after work, family mail during the time blocks, but check the work tags as frequently as possible.  This gives users a finer grain choice, rather than an all or none choice.  The best part is you can reverse that priority at night or during the weekend.  In the normal GTD style workflow, you have to look at every message that hits your inbox.  It just doesn’t make sense to spend even a few minutes of time during the day deferring messages from a hobby mailing list.  This is where the second Zenbe feature steps in to help you.  It is the reorganizable tags list side bar.  The new tag list has two sections, the top section is what I call active tags.  It used to be called favorite tags.  And the bottom section is the rest of your tags.  There is a super easy to use menu on each tag that allows you to pin a tag to the top section, or unpin it.  See the drop down menu that appears when I clicked on the little triangle pull down button that appears when I hover over a tag.

I recommend pinning active tags at the top and changing which tag is pinned as often as needed.  Having the active tags on top makes it easy for us to see any unviewed flag that pops up.  For example, during work hours you might pin only work related tags and unpin your hobby tags.  But on the weekend, you might change it around and put the hobby, family, and only the most important work tag on top, while putting the rest of the work tags below.  I also pin seasonal tags to the top as needed.  For example, during tax season I would put my accountant tag on top, but once my taxes are done, it would go below.  Similarly if I’m planning a vacation, tags related to my travel will be pinned to the top until the trip is over.  In other email clients, the folder or label sidebar is pretty static.  It is almost impossible to arrange labels in gmail.  A label called Tax will always be at the bottom below the fold, even if it is April 14 and it is the most important thing on your mind.

More to Come

I’ve been using this hybrid system for a while now and it works for me.  To me it is a sensible balance of computer aid and human decision making.  You can still follow the general spirit of GTD, but at a finer grain level.  I hope you will give it a try.  I can’t promise you’ll be able to empty your inbox everyday, but it will sure be a easier fight with the sorting capability of a computer on my side.

The core of the Zenbe “methodogy” is outlined here, and we have the new tags sidebar supporting it, we hope to add more features in the near future to make it even easier and better. I look forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback.

Tomorrow morning the Zenbe site will be unavailable beginning at 6:30am and possibly lasting until 8:30am so we can roll out a nice set of new features and bug fixes.

During this time you’ll be unable to login and there may be a brief period of time where you won’t be able to send email from your zenbe.com account via external mail clients like Thunderbird or Outlook.

We’ll complete the upgrade as quickly as we can and put up a blog post here when all systems are go.

This week we had three new employees join Zenbe - Aram, Jade, and Jeremy. They’ve got some serious skills, you know “like nunchuku skills, bow hunting skills, computer hacking skills…”

But seriously, we’re very excited about having even more talented people on the team to help us deliver a bunch of new features to our users. I’ll tell you more about what we’re working on in a future blog post.

We’re still searching for a world-class, well-rounded Linux Administrator/Engineer type who’s into open source software and a startup environment. If you know of anyone in the NYC area that might fit the bill, tell them to check out the job description.

We’ve become big fans of Fluid at Zenbe HQ. If you haven’t tried it yet, it’s a great way to run Zenbe on a Mac — it runs Zenbe as a standalone app, via the WebKit rendering engine. It’s super fast, and it’s really nice to use Zenbe without all the browser chrome.

Here’s a juicy, 128px Finder icon to use with Zenbe in Fluid — enjoy!

My favorite new feature has finally made its way out the door - keyboard shortcuts. We’re still working on a full set of shortcuts, but we didn’t think you’d mind if we rolled out what we have so far. The available shortcuts can be found here: http://forums.zenbe.com/topic/221.

Be sure to let us know which ones you like or dislike, and which ones you feel are still missing.