Here’s how it works: the job seeker is offered a position as a “mystery shopper.” They are told to go to a store, purchase a few small items, and fill out a questionnaire to evaluate their experience with the store staff.

The scammer sends a check in advance for much more than the amount of the purchased items. The shopper is instructed to deposit the check into their account, then deduct the cost of the purchased items and the mystery shopping fee and wire the remainder back to the scammer.

The scammers may even suggest that you wait until the check clears before wiring them the money. Kathy Kristof of CBS MoneyWatch writes:

U.S. banking laws demand that the bank give you access to your funds within 5 days. That gives most consumers the mistaken impression that the check has cleared. It hasn’t. If it’s a forgery, it can take weeks – even months – to determine that it’s a fake.

In the same article Kristof writes:

A recent survey by Consumer Federation of America found that one in every three Americans has been approached by someone peddling a fake check. About 2% of those people bite and end up losing between $3,000 and $4,000 on the con.

The good news for Zenbe users is that most of these scam emails are caught by our spam filters and you probably never see them. But if you get one of these emails it’s helpful to understand how these scams work. Go take the fraud test at fakechecks.org to how susceptible you are.

Also beware of any work-at-home offer that purports to send you a “welcome kit” or solicits an initiation fee, particularly if they ask you to wire the money.

To learn more about email scams in-depth, take a look at the Advance-fee fraud topic on Wikipedia.

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!

I’m impressed how quickly change.gov was released to publish transition information online. Obama plans to hire a national Chief Technology Officer which has caused quite a flutter among the Silicon Valley crowd and stimulated a lot of interesting ideas like opening select government data via standard APIs. And in one of the clearer signs we’re moving into a postmodern presidency, the weekly presidential radio address will also be broadcast on YouTube.

Notably, the potential for new technology to change politics is bi-partisan. Members the Republican party launched their own site to organize opinion and increase activism.

With the air abuzz with technology talk in Washington, it surprised me a bit to learn in the New York Times today that when Barack Obama is sworn into office, he’ll likely lose the ability to communicate via email “because of security risks and fear that messages could be intercepted.”

I certainly understand these concerns but find the notion of a President cut off from email disappointing. The email archiving controversy that plagued the current administration does underscore the risks of using email, but also points out the fact that the Oval Office badly needs a robust, secure, and compliant email infrastructure. Instead of fearing email, I would like to see the incoming administration propose some improvements and safeguards for email in Washington as part of the technology policy the proposed national CTO will responsible for developing and deploying.

I feel bad the President-elect may have to give up his Blackberry for another reason. Shouldn’t the person who holds one of the most difficult jobs in the world be entitled to play a quick round of Brick Breaker every now and then?  Hmmm, on second thought…

We got to hear Seth Godin give his typical energizing presentation on marketing, and on how not to approach it. Its always fun, and mildly irritating, to hear a passionate speaker tell you what you should already know, but can’t figure out how to put into practice. Seth is like Gary Vaynerchuck, or Jim Cramer, but for marketing, and better. Maybe you will learn something when you read his stuff, maybe not, but it will probably be entertaining.

After killing some time at Cosmic Collisions, I watched Fred Wilson and others talk about email and messaging. They mostly spoke about relevance. They wanted an email client that could show them what they cared about. Email’s last-in-first-out grid view doesn’t do the trick.

That is exactly why we created Zenbe. Of course we have the classic email view on the Email tab for now, but we are working on changing the way you interact with your email. Soon, we will release our “Favorites” view. This is essentially a different Inbox, with a different UI, that only shows communication from the people you care about. We would like to automatically determine who is important to you, and we will, someday, but for starters we let you pick who you care about, and then let you communicate and share in an interface that is much friendlier than traditional email clients.

Favorites is just a crude start. We really want to be able to create different groups, we call them networks, and communicate with them each in a different experience. An upcoming version of Zenbe will let me group my friends, or co-workers, or any overlapping network of contacts, and let me see all their communication, email, facebook updates, twits, shared files, events, anything I find appropriate, in a separate view.

Work email won’t get in the way of my social email. When I login to Zenbe and open a window, everything in that window will be relevant to what I want to do, then.

Zenbe has already improved your email experience, but you have not seen anything yet!

Now if Seth could help me explain that Zenbe is a purple cow…

ZenPages allows page members to not only share emails, but also post and share documents, deadlines and due dates while effectively streamlining the communication process within the team.  The ability to invite new members to the project’s ZenPage as they’re needed means you can share the entire project at a glance, instead of sorting through your emails and slowly passing along all the relevant information to the newcomer.

With ZenPages, you can bring order to your email warzone– at work!!

• Zenbe Innovates In relation to other technologies on the web, email is old. And, unfortunately for users, email providers are generally satisfied with the status quo. Zenbe, though, was born to innovate. The folks behind Zenbe started it because they were dissatisfied with the lack of change, and now we are dedicated to taking email into the future with new features and fresh ideas. If change excites you, you should use Zenbe.
• Zenbe Is In Beta Many internet companies have made the word beta a worn-out cliche. Some have used it for years on the same product, and with their lack of innovation, made it seem stale and boring. Others have made it synonymous with buggy or broken. But beta should be a good word–a word that means improvement. That’s what it means for Zenbe. The fact that Zenbe is in beta means that it’s only going to get better. Perhaps the most exciting part, though, is you get to be a part of Zenbe’s future through your suggestions and bright ideas.
• Zenbe Evolves Quickly Most email providers are satisfied to go months or years without significant changes to their product. When updates do come, they are usually minor. Not Zenbe. New features and bug fixes are added often, and the development team works long hours to ensure that you have the best email client now–not in a few years.
• Zenbe Cares About You Let’s face it, every company needs a way to make money. But many email companies make income their first priority, and the users suffer as a result. Ugly flash ads and often irrelevant text ads distract from what you want to do most: use your email. As long as the product makes money, most companies have little desire to improve it. Zenbe, though, puts users first, and our first priority is to craft the best email client on the web.
• We’re Listening I can’t think of any email company that listens to its users like Zenbe does. Unless you are willing to pay premium prices, it is near impossible to get help or offer a suggestion at any of Zenbe’s competitors. Trust me, I’ve tried. While we aren’t perfect, and we can’t answer every question or implement every idea you have, we really do care about your problems and opinions. Keep the feedback coming!

These are just a few things that make Zenbe unique. If you are debating about whether or not to switch, give us a try. I think you’ll see that Zenbe is different.

• Camera – it is so awkward to force 3rd party apps to switch out to the camera app, take a picture, then switch back and pick a photo from the photo roll in order to get a picture.
• Calendar – We would love to have access to the calendar event creation so when our iPhone list application creates a task with a due date we can add it to iPhone’s native calendar.  Without this access a due date in our lists app is pretty meaningless, because we can’t even generate a notification or alarm because we can’t run in the background.
• Real background app – See above.  Without true background processes, it is not possible to write a simple alarm clock.  Apple’s proposed push architecture is good enough for some apps but it won’t work if the phone is out of coverage.  So it is not possible to write a reliable real time alert, such as the due date example.  I know the stability of the iPhone is important, maybe we can get access to the alarm clock so we can set app specific alerts and notifications.
• SMS – SMS is the most direct way for users to send information to another phon e in real time.  It would open up a host of possibilities if social apps can use SMS to message another phone.
• Music library, phone, etc.

Apple’s own applications can do things that can’t be done by 3rd party.  I hope they will gradually remove those artificial limitations to level the playing field.

With Zenbe, you can do everything you need to in 10 minutes a day.  Zenbe is easy to use and streamlined, letting you  catch up on multiple accounts in just a glance. Doubtful? On October 7th, SocialPo.st compared Zenbe to Outlook, the heavyweight email service. (You can read the full story here.) In the end, Zenbe walked away victorious, out-scoring Outlook in organizing email and other ways.

Still need convincing? Set up a free Zenbe email account today. Or do a Google blog search and you’ll see what everyone else is saying about us.

We think there is a third group right in the middle – the elegance-listers.  The elegance-listers want something that does it all, but does it all well.  This is the kind of person we had in mind when developing Zenbe.

In terms of functionality, Zenbe brings multiple communication channels into one user interface.  Users can access all of their various email accounts, Twitter, Facebook, Google Chat in one Web browser, and, in addition, they can share and collaborate on projects with ZenPages.

When it comes to elegance, Zenbe is clean, simple to use and free of ads.  Each of the features listed above is innovative, intuitive, and together they provide one of the best email experiences on the Internet today.

So whether you are a feature-lister,  an elegance-appreciator or right in the middle, Zenbe is right for you!