When we started Zenbe, our original goal was to build the next generation of email.  We’re proud of many of the unique features we pioneered, many of which are still ahead of the curve. We built Zenbe Mail as email users ourselves, and we feel it’s still arguably the very best email experience available.

Meanwhile, over the last few years, the communication landscape has fundamentally changed. Hundreds of millions of smartphones are in use everyday, transforming personal communication. Facebook, Twitter, and other social services have dramatically changed the ways in which people share social information.

Those changes led us to build Shareflow as a way to have more natural conversations and reduce inbox clutter. Recently we’ve  started to explore even more focused Shareflow-like conversations. Blacktop lets you create “trips” from your Foursquare and Facebook check-ins, share those trips, and have conversations about them. Facebook recently highlighted Blacktop in a post on their Platform Page.  And we have plans to bring conversation features to our most popular app, Zenbe Lists.

Unfortunately, as a small company we don’t have enough resources to continue to support all four of our current products.  It was a difficult decision for us, but we ultimately decided to discontinue Mail and focus our efforts on Lists, Shareflow and Blacktop. These, and other mobile, social, sharing applications will be Zenbe’s core focus going forward.

We want to thank our Mail users for supporting us, we understand many of you have come to depend on our mail service for your personal and business email needs.  We apologize for any inconvenience this will cause.  We’ve developed a detailed guide that will help ease your migration to another email service.  The guide, found here, will answer many of your specific questions.  Note, we stopped our billing for Mail a month ago, and we’ll not bill any accounts during this migration period.

Lastly, Zenbe Mail was a labor of love. We’re going to miss it, too.

The following is a guide to moving your data out of Zenbe Mail.

Please begin moving your data as soon as you can. Transferring your email out of Zenbe Mail may take several days or more.

If you need technical support specific to your account that is not covered here, please email migration@zenbe.zendesk.com.

Migration Guide

• Timetable
• Setting up email forwarding
• Migrating custom email domains
• Downloading your mail via POP
• Downloading your mail via IMAP (advanced)
• Exporting your Address Book
• Exporting your calendars

Timetable

Zenbe Mail will be shutdown on Oct 8th, 2010. After that time you will no longer be able to login to the web site, or access your mail via POP or IMAP.

If you use Shareflow, you will still be able to login to Shareflow via your normal login page.

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Setting up email forwarding

Mail forwarding allows email sent to your Zenbe address to be forwarded to a new email address. This helps ensure you don’t miss any email while you are notifying your contacts of your new email address.

We recommend the account Administrator set up forwarding address for all their users right away. Once you setup mail forwarding, you will no longer see copies of the forwarded mail in your Zenbe inbox – it will only be available in your new mail service.

Administrators should login, then click the “forwarding” link in the upper-right corner of your screen to set up forwarding.

Please note that this only forwards email sent to your Zenbe address. It does not forward email from any external fetched accounts that you setup in Zenbe.

We will provide email forwarding until January, 2011. We will notify anyone using the forwarding service before we discontinue it.

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Migrating custom email domains

If you use a custom email domain at Zenbe, you must migrate the domain to a different service to continue to receiving email. Consult the documentation at your new email service for how to configure your custom domain.

Downloading your mail via POP

Zenbe runs POP servers that allow you to download your email. Many hosted email services can import your Zenbe mail via POP.

Here are the settings for the Zenbe POP server:

• Server: pop.zenbemail.com
• Port: 995
• Username: your email address (i.e. alice@acme.zenbe.com)
• SSL: true

The following hosted email services can import your POP mail from Zenbe:

• GMX
• Gmail and Google Apps: Instructions here
• Windows Live Hotmail: Instructions here

You can also use a free desktop email program to download your Zenbe Personal Mail to your computer via POP, including:

• Apple Mail (Mac-only)
• Thunderbird (Windows, Mac, Linux)
• Windows Live Mail (Windows-only)

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Downloading your mail via IMAP (advanced)

Our IMAP service allows you to download your Zenbe mail. It has the benefit of preserving your folders and the read/unread state of each message, but is more difficult to configure than POP. We only recommend this option to users who are already familiar with setting up IMAP accounts.

Here are the settings for the Zenbe Personal Mail IMAP server. Instructions for specific programs are further below.

• Server: imap.zenbemail.com
• Port: 993
• Username: your full email address (i.e. bob@acme.zenbe.com)
• SSL: true

You may also be asked for an SMTP server:

• Server: smtp.zenbemail.com
• Port: 587
• Username: your full email address (i.e. bob@acme.zenbe.com)
• TLS (or SSL): true

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Using a desktop program

IMAP is supported by almost every major desktop mail program. Some programs default to only downloading the message when you click on it. When using an desktop mail program with IMAP, it is critical that you setup the program to download the entire message from the Zenbe IMAP servers.  If you don’t do this, you may not be able to retrieve your messages after we shutdown the Zenbe Mail service. The latest versions of Apple Mail, Windows Live Mail, and Thunderbird 3 do this automatically, but consult the documentation for your email program to be sure.

Exporting your Address Book

You can export your contacts in your Zenbe Address Book as a CSV file. After logging in to Zenbe, click the “Address Book” icon in the QuickView sidebar.

Click the “add…” dropdown button, and click “export (csv)”.

A file called “contacts.csv” was downloaded to your computer. You can now import this contacts.csv into many popular address book programs.

• For Google Mail, follow these instructions.
• For Mac Address Book, follow these instructions.
• For Windows Contacts, follow these instructions.

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Exporting your calendars

You can export each Zenbe calendar as an iCalendar file. After logging in to Zenbe, click the “Calendar” tab.

Click the gear icon in the top right to open the “Manage Calendars” pane.

For each calendar you wish to export, click on the name of the calendar. Copy and paste the “private address” url into a new browser window.

After you paste the private address in a new browser window, press enter. A file called “zencal.ics” will download to your computer. zencal.ics can be imported into almost any calendar program.

• For Google Calendar, follow these instructions.
• For Mac iCal, drag zencal.ics onto the iCal dock icon, or double-click zencal.ics.
• For Microsoft Outlook, follow these instructions for importing an iCalendar or vCalendar file, or double-click zencal.ics.

Note that you’ll need to repeat these steps for each Zenbe calendar you wish to export.

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If we get nothing but praise for this feature, why is it so rarely found among Zenbe’s competition? Because it’s difficult. Not difficult to understand or to use, but difficult to implement.

Read on for an in-depth discussion of what makes this problem so difficult, how we’ve solved it, and why it was worth the effort.

I’m now working on a native iPhone application that will include all of the features of our HTML5 web application plus camera/photo upload integration, offline data access, location integration, better email/sms integration and improved native feel and performance.

I’m using the excellent three20 framework originally created at Facebook. Three20 provides a nice bridge from a web development mindset to the iPhone SDK by introducing concepts like declarative styling, URL based navigation and simplified remote resource access.

Here are a few screenshots of the work in progress.

We’d love to hear your ideas for other things you’d look for in a native iPhone application. Tweet your ideas @shareflow.

Include File Attachments In Your Replies

One of your most-requested features is here! You can now attach files to a comment.

This is a great way to work together on a document. For example, say a coworker posts a draft version of a file for you to review. You can make your changes, and attach your version in a reply to the original post—keeping the original and subsequent versions together in one post. Just click the button to attach a file to your comment. We’ve also made it easier to post a set of files all at once and include a comment. Just upload the files you want and make your comment before posting. This works for both replies and original posts.

Here’s a quick demo of this new feature in action:

Works with Email Too!

We know that some people prefer to work out of their email inbox. That’s why we added real-time notifications and the ability to respond to Shareflow posts via email. With our latest release, you can now include file attachments in your email responses to Shareflow posts. The attached files will be added to your comment in Shareflow.

Drag and Drop from your Desktop

At Zenbe we like to stay on top of emerging technology and we’re big fans of HTML5. Firefox 3.6 now supports native drag and drop file uploading from your desktop.

Check out this demo:

For those of you that prefer not to use Firefox 3.6, we also have a great desktop widget that allows drag and drop file uploading.

Enrich the conversation with Tweets and Google Docs

We’re always looking for innovative ways to enrich the conversations in Shareflow. We already enhance Shareflow posts by embedding youtube, vimeo, hulu, flickr, and wikipedia content. Now we’ve added Tweets and Google Docs to the growing list of content that we automatically identify and embed. Embedding a tweet in Shareflow is a great way to discuss and archive feedback your company or group may be receiving on twitter.

Signup for Free Today

Shareflow now offers 1GB of file storage, unlimited collaborators and unlimited conversations all for FREE! If you haven’t signed up for Shareflow yet, there’s no better time. Thanks so much for using Shareflow and keep the feedback coming!

Congratulations, Shareflow!

Like all such awards, its just a matter of how many friends you have.

And that’s true, except that no one in our office has any friends, or was ever voted class president, or anything.   We are so ordinary its not worth discussing.

But Shareflow rocks.  We don’t have any friends, so our customers must think so. Thanks, everyone!

Next week we will be deploying some changes that our beta testers have enjoyed for a few weeks:

Simple document management

You can add and delete multiple files, to a post or individual comment, via web, desktop, or email.  You can post multiple versions of a document and keep the comments associated with each, or delete older versions of documents but keep the comments, or any combination. Its the simplest, most flexible document workflow available.

Drag and Drop Files

Just drag a file from your desktop and drop it on a flow. This only works in Firefox 3.6, but its very handy.  Of course, you can do this with our desktop widget, dropping files into your browser is fun too.

These features and more will be coming out next week.  Stay tuned.

Please show your support by heading over to About.com and casting a vote for us!

If you haven’t checked out Shareflow yet, get a free account and invite some of the people you communicate with the most. It’s a great replacement for group mailing lists, whether it’s for your local soccer team or an entire department at your company. Try it out today.

We have been debating if the  25 MB limit on our free account is limiting adoption.

So forget the limit.

Starting tomorrow, we will be offering  FREE Shareflow with up to 1 GB of storage.

Crazy. That ought to keep you going for quite awhile.  Years, probably.  No invite needed.  Just sign up at http://getshareflow.com.

(If you already have a free Shareflow account, you get the extra space too!)

When someone posts a file in Shareflow, you can find it easily with the search controls in the upper right without needing Files View.

Still, Files View is useful, and some users have asked for this functionality in Shareflow.

On my way out to some meetings  last Friday I made a passing comment as I put on my shoes (we have a no-shoe office), and by the time I got back, our amazing development team had Files view on Shareflow deployed to our staging environment.  They did this using only their left hands, using their right hands to work on their regular queue.

If you don’t see it already, it will be deployed to your Shareflow environment soon.  Look for “Files” under “Starred Post” on your Shareflow page.  The initial functionality will be somewhat simplistic, but expect more expressive filtering and sharing features to be deployed over the next couple of weeks.  Enjoy.

Soon, Shareflow users will get real-time notifications via email when new posts appear.  Replying to an email notification shows up as a comment on Shareflow, and sends an email notification to other flow members.

Now your whole team stays connected on Shareflow whether you choose to use it through email, on the web site, via the desktop widget, or on your mobile device.

Real-time email notifications are delivered in addition to your daily digests. Both types of emails can be turned on or off independently.

If you have not used Shareflow, you might ask “If I am just going to get emails and reply to emails all day long, why use Shareflow at all?”

When you use Shareflow, your communication stays organized and accessible:

1) In your email inbox, new stuff comes in on top and old stuff gets pushed off the bottom, regardless of importance. Shareflow keeps everything organized in separate conversations, called “flows”.  You can use email or the web site to communicate through Shareflow and nobody has to do any extra work to keep things organized. No more setting up complicated rules to file important emails from the team – you see the info you need where you expect it.

Keeping important, long running conversations organized is the best way to keep everyone working well together. Cluttering up your the inbox of your team members is probably the worst.

2) Shareflow works in real-time, giving you the immediacy of instant messaging, but the persistence of email or a web page. You can hold a real-time chat with some team members when they are online with you, and the others will be caught up the next time they check in.

3) Shareflow makes it much easier to share files, even very large files.

4) Shareflow is a better way to get work done on your mobile browser. When I open my mobile email on the road, its filled with lots of stuff on a small screen. Finding what’s important is hard. But when I need updates from my most important contacts – like my development team, investors, etc. – I launch the Shareflow mobile web site and can see what’s going on with one click.

With real-time email notifications, everyone will get my Shareflow response right away, and their replies will be added to the flow.

The Details:

• Since many Shareflow users expected real-time email notifications in the first place, flows default to having this feature enabled.
• All flows will have real-time email notifications turned on.
• To disable these notifications for an individual flow, login to Shareflow, select the cog wheel in the upper right, and unselect “Email me notifications of new Activity” on the settings panel.
• Clicking “unsubscribe now” from the footer of any Shareflow email will disable ALL types of types of Shareflow emails: daily digests and real-time notifications.