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.

Update: This issue was resolved.

Due to a network problem at our data center, todo lists on zenbe.com and external SMTP access for sending mail (i.e. from Apple Mail or Thunderbird), are currently down.

We are working with the team at the data center to resolve the problem shortly. We’ll post an update when the services are restored.

Thank you for your patience.

Zenbe.com will be down for maintenance from 12:01 am to 4:00 am EDT Sunday, October 26. IMAP service will also be unavailable during this time. Zenbe Lists will be unaffected.

During the downtime, we’ll make some changes behind the scenes to ensure email and files are backed up quickly and efficiently.

FYI -

This morning we experienced delays delivering email to your zenbe.com address. We had a problem with one of our incoming mail servers and some mail to your zenbe.com address may have been queued while the server was unavailable. No email was lost, but you may see email that arrived an hour or two later than it was sent.

Additionally, our POP server was down for a little while.

These problems have been corrected. Please double-check your Inbox as some new messages that were delayed may show up a little bit further down in the message listing.

This Thursday, October 2nd, we’re going to perform maintenance on the Zenbe.com site and have some downtime. The site will be down between 4am and 8am Eastern Time, although if we get the maintenance done sooner we’ll definitely bring everything up earlier.

During this maintenance window we’ll be upgrading some servers as well as introducing some new features. During this time you won’t be able to login to the site nor use external mail clients like Apple Mail or Thunderbird, but you will continue to receive email.

This release will introduce IMAP support and we’ll also enable some alpha testers for our conversation view feature that we’ve been working on.

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.

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.

Tomorrow morning our systems will be offline from 6-7:30am Eastern time so we can do some maintenance. Hopefully the maintenance will be less than an hour long, but we’ve scheduled it for an hour just in case.

Sorry about the inconvenience but we’re adding some capacity so we can invite more beta users.