Bloggers: check out a nice post by Brian Casel about how he uses Zenbe Lists to keep track of ideas for his blog.

Keeping Track of Blog Post Ideas with Zenbe Lists

If you’re a blogger, you know how important it is to write down your ideas as soon as they come to you.  If you don’t, you’ll forget them and wish you had them when it comes time to write.  Every good blogger should have a long list of blog post ideas ready to go when they’re needed.

Thanks Brian!

We use email a lot at Zenbe. After all, we built an email platform from scratch about 3 years ago because we felt like it was the right time to take email in a new direction.

However, as a team we found it difficult to be truly productive with email alone. Why? A few reasons:

• Hunt-and-peck syndrome
  Important emails get mixed in with less important emails. Rules, tags, and personal discipline help, but I still have to scan or search more often than I should to find what I need.
• “Oops, I forgot to CC you!”
  I just sent out my latest product proposal to my business partner and product designer. But I forgot to CC the lead engineer. So I forward it to him. But then the product designer replies to the original email and the lead engineer doesn’t get the reply. ARGH! Now everyone’s out of sync and I need to fix it somehow.
• Frequent distractions
  I’m searching for that proposal you sent me two days ago when an email with specials from Amazon.com pops into my inbox. Trying…to…resist. Oh well, I guess finding the proposal can wait.

Sound familiar? Our frustration with issues like those lead us to ask a few questions:

• How do we reduce the amount of mental context-switching people have to do when processing their email? When the first email of the day I read is a marketing proposal, and the second email I read is about hiring, my mind has to leap from one topic to another. This decreases productivity.
• How do we make sure the right people are involved in a conversation? And if we forgot to include someone, how do we make it easy for them to get caught up with what we’re discussing?

We tried a number of different tools to try to solve these problems. Instant messaging, a wiki, an internal blog, and Google Docs are just a few. But that just scattered the information in multiple places.

Our solution is embodied in our new product: Shareflow. Shareflow allows you to have focused conversations with the people that matter.

Instead of emailing individuals or groups, you share email, files, comments, events and more in a “flow”. And then you invite people to the flow where the conversation ensues in a central place.

Any participant can share and comment on things in a flow. But the flow creator decides who gets to be a part of the flow to keep the conversation on topic. People can be added or removed from a flow at any time.

My most important communication with my teammates is now contextualized in the different flows I participate in. When I’m working with a conversation in a flow, I know the right people are seeing the information and we’re not going to be disrupted by an off-topic email.

To make things more concrete, I’ll give you a few examples of how I use Shareflow day-to-day.

The “Team Zenbe” Flow

Who has access?

Everyone who works at Zenbe.

What do we share?

Anything of interest to the entire company. Examples include:

• Documents describing new product or marketing initiatives.
• Links to articles relevant to our industry or products, and internal comments.
• Questions about a feature we’re building, or the timing of a product release.
• Events like company holidays or outings.

What does it look like?

Here’s an actual screenshot. This is just a section of the flow. Content is ordered from most recently updated to least recently updated. In this screenshot you see two tiles. One is an interview with an inspiring entrepreneur that I posted along with my comments. The other tile is a document Peter wrote about Shareflow for the entire team to review. You see people’s comments right below the original posts:

Click image to enlarge

The “Founders” Flow

Who has access?

The four Zenbe co-founders: Alan, Peter, Robert and myself.

What do we share?

Information related to business development and strategy. Examples include:

• Contact information for people we meet and network with.
• Copies of emails (yes – you can send an email directly to a flow!) to or from partners and advisers.
• Documents and proposals we sent or received. On a side note, our inline document viewer makes reading documents right in the browser a breeze, regardless of the original document format.
• Events related to trade shows, demos, or other business meetings.

What does it look like?

I can’t show you! It contains private information. But that’s one of the great things about Shareflow. Only the founders have access to the “Founders” flow. Unlike a typical social network where everyone in the network can see everything, in Shareflow you get to choose who participates in each flow.

Our “Founders” flow allows us to distribute who takes the lead on a certain strategic initiative or relationship but ensures that if that person is unavailable for a call or meeting any of the other founders has enough background info to step in.

The “Zenbe Developers” Flow

Who has access?

All of the developers at Zenbe.

What do we share?

Geeky development stuff mostly. The fancy term for it is “organizational knowledge management.” Examples include:

• Questions and suggestions about our programming conventions and libraries.
• Links to tools and technologies we find interesting.
• Discussions about bug fixes or feature development.

What does it look like?

The screenshot below depicts some recent posts on the Zenbe Developers flow. Will and Jeremy created and shared a ruby script that generates command-line reports from our bug tracking system. We’ve also been discussing the technical details of Google Wave. Will posted a YouTube video which was automatically embedded in the flow.

Click image to enlarge

We have similar Flows for other functional groups at Zenbe, like system operations, user interface design and customer support.

The “Son of Zengeist” Flow

Who has access?

Everyone who works at Zenbe.

What do we share?

“Son of Zengeist” is like our virtual water cooler. It’s where we share stuff that’s not directly relevant to anything in particular, but is interesting or funny.

It’s nice to visit the “Son of Zengeist” flow to take a break every now and then. Here’s a screenshot of how we’ve been entertaining ourselves recently:

Click image to enlarge

How Shareflow and Email Work Together

I still check my email first thing in the morning. We still email each other at Zenbe, mostly for one-on-one conversations. A lot of times I’ll get a useful email from someone and post it to Shareflow. From within Zenbe Mail it’s just two clicks, or if I’m using another email service I can forward the email to a Shareflow-specific address.

Next I check my Shareflow activity. I click “All Flows” to scan the most recent activity across all flows I participate in, or I click on an individual flow to focus on what’s happening there.

Because every flow is built around a context, my distractions are minimized. When I am browsing a flow, I am literally “in the flow.” If that flow is updated I see it right away, but unlike getting a new email the flow update is almost certainly relevant to the topic I’m currently thinking about.

I also no longer have to nag my coworkers so much with questions like “Did you get that email I sent you?” Now I say “Hey, go check out that file I shared on the Team Zenbe flow” and I know they’ll see what I’m talking about because it’s not buried in their inbox.

Shareflow For Everyone

Shareflow is already available to paid Zenbe Mail accounts. In the next two weeks we’ll launch it as a standalone service.

We think it’s an incredibly productive way to communicate and want you to try it regardless of what email service you use. You can invite anyone to join a flow, not just people in your organization.

Free and paid plans will be available. Check back here for more news soon.

With the release of products like Mozilla Prism and Google Chrome, people are realizing that web applications like Zenbe work great as stand-alone desktop applications. Here’s a step by step guide to bringing Zenbe to your desktop.

Step 1: Choose Your Browser

The first step in bringing Zenbe to your destkop is to choose a site-specific browser. There are three choices: Google Chrome, Mozilla Prism, or Fluid (for Mac only). I will use Mozilla Prism for this tutorial as Google Chrome is not yet officially supported by Zenbe, and I can’t use Fluid because I’m a PC user.

Step 2: Install Mozilla Prism

If you’ve never used Mozilla Prism before, you will have to install it in Firefox. You can download it here.

Once you’ve installed Prism, go to Zenbe.com and login. In your Firefox menubar, click “Tools” and then “Convert website to application.” Select the options you want on the menu that appears and click “Ok”.

Step 3: Change Your Icon

The icon that is generated automatically by Prism looks pretty pixelated and ugly, so I created a higher quality one. You can download it here (don’t worry if it looks tiny–it will be normal size after you download it).

Once you’ve downloaded the icon to your destkop, right click on the shortcut created by Prism and select “Properties.”

Under the “Shortcut” tab, click “Change icon.” Browse for the .ico file and select it. That’s it! Enjoy Zenbe on your desktop!

There are a lot of email providers on the web–so why should you use Zenbe? While there are many reasons (like great features), here are a few of the most important ones:

• 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.

Sam Guzmán blogged about Zenbe versus Microsoft Outlook over on his SocialPo.st blog. Outlook users might be interested to to check it out and learn more about Zenbe’s approach to productivity management.

Thanks Sam!

Here’s a quick rundown of some of the new features we launched yesterday on the Zenbe Webmail service:

Use email avatars for a more social email experience

You can now pick pictures for your email contacts and see them right along with their email. When you open an email from a friend or colleague, rollover the silhouette next to their address and click the pencil icon to open the contact photo picker. You can select a photo from our collection, an image from the files you already have on Zenbe, or search non-copyrighted images on Flickr to select an avatar for your contact.

Once you select a photo for a contact, every email that you receive from that person will show the picture you selected.

Also, some of you may not have known that Zenbe supports Gravatars. The Gravatar service allows you to associate a picture with any of your email addresses. If you use Gravatar to associate a photo with any of the email addresses you use in Zenbe, then your friends using Zenbe will automatically see your Gravatar image when they open an email from you. If any of your contacts are already using Gravatar, you’ll see their Gravatar photos when you open their email.

Gravatar pictures are also shown in our blog comments and forums when you post there.

Keep track of your favorite contacts

We know that you email some of your contacts more than others so we now allow you to mark certain contacts as “Favorites”. In your address book, click the blue star next to a contact name to add them to your favorites. You can then use the pulldown menu in the address book to only show your favorite contacts.

Did you know that you can quickly compose an email or search for a contact in one click from your address book? Just hover over the name of any contact and click on the binocular icon to search or the envelope icon to compose a new email to that person.

IMAP

Zenbe now supports accessing your email via the IMAP protocol. IMAP allows you to view your messages from a desktop application like Apple Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird or Microsoft Outlook. It also works with many cell phone models, including the iPhone. Any email you read or delete on your desktop or phone will also show up as read or deleted on the Zenbe website.

The current version of Zenbe IMAP allows you to read and delete messages from any of the email accounts you check in Zenbe, but only messages that are in your Inbox. It’s designed especially for people who are on-the-go and want to check to see if anything important came into their Inbox via a mobile device.

If you’re interested, check out our help on how to setup IMAP.

Notifications when we can’t check your other email accounts

Many of you use Zenbe to check your email from other email accounts like Gmail, Yahoo Plus!, .Mac, or the email address you received from cable providers like Comcast or Time Warner. Sometimes you may change your password on one of these accounts but forget to tell Zenbe about the change. Now when that happens we’ll tell you which account we had a problem checking and the cause of the problem when you log in.

If you haven’t set up Zenbe to check your other email accounts, it’s very easy to do. Check our help on how to setup almost any email account in Zenbe. We’ll do all the hard work of figuring out which server settings to use. We also encrypt your password so your data is safe with us.

Conversation View Preview

We’re working on a conversation view that shows you all the messages associated with a particular conversation in a single view, similar to what many Gmail users are accustomed to. Unlike Gmail, Zenbe allows you to toggle the conversation view on and off if you don’t like it.

Next week we’ll start inviting users to preview this great new feature. If you’d like to be included in the preview, sign up to test conversation view here.

Bug Fixes

We’ve fixed several bugs including some you told us about on our User Forums:

• Files View Tag Filtering
• Firefox 3 mailto: handler improvements
• Better support for international characters

Closing your account

We realize that Zenbe is not for everyone and now provide a form you can fill out to close your account. If you do cancel your account, please let us know a little bit about why so we can continue to make Zenbe a great free email product.

Learn more about Zenbe

If you’re new to Zenbe and want to learn more, make sure to check our our help and FAQ and set up an account on our User Forums to tell us what you think.

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.

For our iPhone app users, please be aware that we’ve had a couple reports of people losing their list data when they update the application. This seems to be a problem with the App Store update mechanism. I haven’t seen anything official from apple, but other applications are having the same issue. Here’s some of the reports from the wild:

• http://www.tuaw.com/2008/07/25/data-loss-from-app-store-updates/
• http://www.appletell.com/apple/comment/is-there-an-iphone-app-update-bug/
• http://www.appletell.com/apple/comment/data-loss-from-app-store-updates/

I know this may be too late for most of you, but if you haven’t updated to v1.2, I recommend that you “sync” your data to our servers before updating. Go to lists.zenbe.com to create a free account, then hit the “sync” button in Zenbe Lists and enter your account credentials. If your data is ever lost, it will be restored from the Zenbe servers the next time you sync.

If this post is too-little-too-late for you, I apologize. I’ll post an update here if/when we find a way to recover the lost data.

Also, the MacBreak Weekly podcast, Episode #100, [iTunes link, about 28:30 in] mentions that updating and restoring apps via iTunes may avoid a variety of issues that occur when using the App Store in the iPhone.

There was a Lifehacker post today about Gmail’s ability to tag outgoing emails by rules.  The usage example in the article that was most interesting to me was a rule that searches for a keyword like “Request” in any outgoing email’s subject and tagging it “Waiting for” to mark it as something I’m expecting a reply.  This is useful to many of us who sends out many emails in a day, and it is very hard to keep track of the ones I don’t get a reply back and need to follow up again.

However, using a rule to look for a specific keyword that I have to include in my subject line seems like a round about way to mark an email as expecting a reply.  What if I can’t work the word “Request” into the email subject?  Or my subject contains the word Request, but I’m not waiting for anything back.  In Zenbe we’ve an easier solution.  You can simply tag any outgoing email before you send it.  Zenbe provides a tagging mechanism in our compose window.  That’s where I can add my “ExpectReply” tag to any outgoing emails I am expecting a response.

In additional to it being a good way to organize your outgoing emails, those tags can optionally be sent along with the email.  If the receiver is another Zenbe user, those outgoing tags will be visible for the receiver reading the message as Suggested Tags.  For example, I can tag emails I’m sending to the Zenbe team, UIDesign, Bugs, or Features.

Suggested Tags are potentially a helpful time saving tool because it allows one person to help others tagging their emails.  If a circle of friends or co-workers all tag their relevant outgoing emails, then we share the load of organizing our inboxes.  We all know keeping emails filed correctly with tags is a time consuming task.  If I send out a message about a work project to 10 people, why should those 10 people have to spend more than a second to accept my Suggested Tag.  By taking a little time to tag my outgoing emails, not only am I organizing my own emails, I’m also helping receivers of that email organize it.

We at Zenbe understand in today’s world of multi-gigabyte mailboxes, the ability to find something in your mailbox quickly and easily is of utmost importance.  Which is why Zenbe provides an extensive set of features including a rich Advanced Search UI  and Filtering mechanism.  They are powerful yet user friendly tools to locate information.

However, for the expert users the most powerful search tool might be the simple search box.   I use it everyday, and today I like to share with you the secrets of our search syntax.

Search Terms

A search is made up of one or more search terms separated by spaces. Terms containing a space must be wrapped in double quotes. E.g.,

“new york”
“pedro martinez”

By default, terms are joined by the AND operator. Valid term operators are AND, OR, and NOT (not case sensitive). NOT binds before AND. AND binds before OR.  There are special terms we call tokens.  Valid tokens are:

• from:
• to: (searches to, cc, and bcc fields)
• cc:
• subject:
• tag: (searches both system & user tags)
• body:
• before:  (date)
• after:  (date)
• viewed:  (true or false)
• has_attachments: (true or false)

Here are some example of searches using tokens:

• sidebar tag:zenbe  (This searches for all emails containing the word sidebar tagged zenbe)
• tag:accountant  (This searches for all emails tagged accountant)
• from:alan  (This searches for all emails from sender alan)
• tag:”new york” from:”pedro martinez”  (Searches for emails tagged new york from sender Pedro Martinez)
• tag:zenbe -from:peter  (returns emails tagged zenbe that are not from peter)
• (from:peter or from:alan) viewed:false  (return emails from either peter or alan that are unviewed)
• -(from:peter or from:alan) tag:design  (return emails from anyone besides peter and alan tagged design)
• before:6-25-2007  (return emails from before 6-25-2007)

In the example with the term -from:peter, it is the same as NOT from:peter.  A ‘-’ before a token negates the meaning.

System Tags

The following tags are special system tags (as opposed to user-created tags):

• tag:Inbox
• tag:Starred
• tag:Drafts
• tag:Sent
• tag:Spam
• tag:Deleted
• tag:Archive
• tag:Unread

These system tags allow you to easily search in your Inbox or Sent emails, etc.  The system tag names has to be capitalized.  Here are some example uses:

• tag:Inbox tag:Unread
• (tag:Spam OR tag:Deleted) “some missing email”

The first example will return any Unread emails in the inbox, and the second example will return any emails in the Spam or Deleted tags that contain the phrase “some missing email”  I hope this blog post will help you make the most out of the very powerful search engine underneat the Zenbe hood.  Enjoy.