The most publicized improvements to email in recent memory haven’t been browser-based, they’ve been extensions like Xobni and Xoopit that latch onto your existing mail client and provide auxiliary services.
This tactic makes good business sense – who wants to try convincing Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and Gmail users to take a leap of faith and walk away from these BigCo solutions for an unproven startup? As things stand, that migration is necessary without a way to integrate 3rd-party technologies into those popular webmail services.
Zenbe is one company willing to go out on a limb, build a completely stand-alone webmail solution, and push the envelope on what’s possible with email. The service, which is currently in private beta but available to the first 500 readers who sign up here, makes advances in a number of areas. It also provides a glimpse at what “email as a platform” really means.
The app’s most superficial improvement is a beautiful user interface. Spend a few minutes clicking around Zenbe and you’ll find that it really does deserve the “zen” moniker.
But good looks are far from its only selling point. You also get fully integrated calendar, task list, and address book capabilities, easily accessible through an ever-present sidebar. There’s a Xoopit-like tab with which you can browse all the files contained across your emails. These files are viewable by type: images, documents, spreadsheets, audio/video files, and events. As with emails, you can star files to indicate their importance; you can also hover over them to see previews. And there’s a Facebook tab in the sidebar that lets you see your friends’ most recent updates.
Zenbe’s big idea, however, consists of a feature called “ZenPages” that are intended to help you organize your email into projects or topics. Instead of just putting messages into folders (which Zenbe doesn’t have anyway; it’s a tag-based system like Gmail), you can assign messages to ZenPages with specially designated tags. For example, I can assign all messages tagged with “techcrunch50″ to a TechCrunch50 conference ZenPage.
Once there, I can do a lot of useful things with them. First off, I can invite others (whether Zenbe users or not) to my ZenPage and they can view all my relevant emails. If they so choose, they can also share relevant messages using the same ZenPage. This lets groups collaborate around email without having to CC each other on every single one. Calendar events can also be shared this way.
In addition to sharing emails and calendars, you can install a range of other default widgets: a group task list, an agenda, a discussion thread, and a list of relevant links. But here’s where your imagination should take off: Zenbe also plans to allow 3rd-party apps onto these pages, ones that have direct access to users’ emails.
Zenbe is already showcasing a set of 3rd-party integrations, including widgets for YouTube, Flickr, Picasa, Google Chat, and Google Maps. But none of these actually leverage any email data. For one that did, imagine a TripIt that sat within a ZenPage and automatically parsed all of your flight itinerary emails. This would cut out the step of manually forwarding your emails to the service.
Email data is highly valuable and pertinent information for users, so it doesn’t take a great stretch of the imagination to think of other possible email-parsing apps. Maybe someone could even use the platform (once rolled out in full) to solve the email overload problem, or finally build a real social network around email.
Zenbe comes with 4GB of storage for each user. It currently doesn’t display any advertisements, and it only has plans to display them on ZenPages (it sees an opportunity to provide sponsored template ZenPages for certain project types).
Looks cool app for me. I will spend more time today and check out different features. I got a great login name as well.
Mark, I see more and more people are creating apps and pages with Green background. Are they supporting going Green or copying Techcrunch?
This is great and everything, but all my documents and dates are already in gDocs and gCal with my emails either forwarded to or in gmail. It would be quite a task moving all of that stuff over, plus I would love the online collaboration features of gDocs.
Or am I missing something here?
I love the fileview feature!
The only real important question is, can it block spam as well or better than gmail? If not, try again.
Yes….it blocks spam very well. I actually had to tell it not to block some messages that it labeled as spam that really weren’t.
I have more than 10 email accounts. I would love some thing which helps me integrate all of them into a single view but still keeps the accounts seperate. In other words I should be able to get independent and integrated view of all email accounts. Currently we are using Zimbra for internal communications which partly handes this job.
I’ve logged in, and this actually looks nice and clean to me. I’ll try using it for a while, particularly for the mail sharing functionality. And the widget system sounds like genius – this is much more than webmail.
@2 That’s the kind of problem we’re designing OpenDD to solve. All thoughts appreciated.
We’ll acquire them if they gain any marketshare, but right now the site is way to slow — preventing registration.
Tried signing up a few times and all I get is a server error. Let’s hope the invites don’t finish up before the server error gets corrected.
I’ve tried to sign up 3 times and get:
———————
Server Error:
We were notified of the problem, and we’ll fix it as soon as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please try again in a moment.
Nice app. I was thinking of something simular to ZenPages but made differently. However i beleive that this way of conversation is better then email.
Hi — we’re fixing the server error right now. Hang in there.
This is actually a pretty neat webmail interface. It took me a few tries to get signed up but now that I’m in it is worth it. Much better than orgoo imho….
After filling out their form, I keep running into
Server Error:
We were notified of the problem, and we’ll fix it as soon as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please try again in a moment.
And I’ve gotten it many times over a long period of many moments
Are they going to let us use this outside of an @zenbe.com address? If so, I’d be interested because of how well designed it is, but I’m not intent on changing over to @zenbe.com.
i am amazed, but delighted, to find out that the username “mike” was somehow not already taken. craziness.
Registration was a tad slow… but once it finished… Oh my GOOOOOD!!!
Mark… thank you!! This is an AWESOME email client… I was, of course, skeptical of this when I took the invite and signed up… but wow. Talk about changing the game… A short while into this and I am blown away by what this team has put together… talk about innovating and reinvigorating a tired old space! AWESOME JOB ZENBE TEAM!
IMPORTANT TO KNOW: You ARE able to import your gmail and other email accounts into this experience which will certainly ease a lot of the “reluctant to switch email apps”… because your contacts can still use whatever current email address they have for you. So you do not have to literally “walk away from BigCo” per se… you can still maintain those contacts. That’s important to know when considering/reviewing this service.
Guess the servers got techcrunched…
I tried to register but alas the server is down
By the power of Gray Skull! We are mighty.
i’m not too fond of the interface.. perhaps introduce more skins. but nice app. allow users to add tabs for other emails or rss like netvibes.. because netvibes has been sucking lately.
Who is posing as me? Loser.
Thanks all for the interest! The invitations are gone, but we will be opening up more very soon. To request an invite, visit us at http://www.zenbe.com.
@14, Absolutely. Zenbe can send and receive email with any POP-based email address.
I got in and sent myself a test message from my office email – no sign of it in my zenbe inbox
Got an account and wow, this is pretty nice, I wouldn’t mind paying to use it…
Zenbe folks – make it clear to me what will happen if I add my other accounts. Will my mail be deleted from there and now be on Zenbe only? Will Imap be supported at some point?
No accounts left =0(
No accounts left =0(
When Zenbe POPs emails from the server it will not delete it, so it is safe to import your emails into Zenbe. IMAP support is on our roadmap.
ok. my message arrived a couple of minutes ago. some caching issue maybe? Needs to be a lot quicker. Same message forwarded from my office email to gmail arrived in about 6 seconds.
page hangs and doesn’t refocus when I manage my emails / rules. also mails aren’t being tagged.
I am personally waiting for zengoohoo.com.
Missed out on signing up for an account, but the screenshots look promising. Curious to know if there’ll be a white-label small biz/enterprise edition. Employees around here are craving something simple and integrated yet open and collaborative — usually not features one tends to find in a single service.
at the moment the page is a little bit too slow. also it takes more than 15 minutes to send an email from Gmail to Zenbe. Other direction took 4 seconds.
all the invites are already gone? damn
This looks pretty interesting/promising. Thanks for the heads up!
thank you for not writing about twitter.
Isn’t this like BlueTie?
travel.bluetie.com
This is kind of what I wish GMail / Google Docs / Calendar would have evolved in to. Can’t wait to get in, more invites please!
@36 what makes you think it won’t?
@36 & @37
Thats is exactly why I dont feel I can migrate from gmail, I am too attached to gDocs
Looks pretty interesting – hoping to find an invite since tc’s ran out.
@38, why would using Docs affect your mail client? That’s the basic problem with Google apps imho, they’re all standalone, no integration.
This doesn’t seem to have any overlap with gDocs at all — content managment rather than creation. Interesting to see if they go that way, but at the moment Zenbe looks like an integrated Gmail + Gcal + Backpack.
Wow.. I love the twist Zenbe has, the fileview and pages are excellent!
#21:
————————————
Michael Arrington
April 30th, 2008 at 9:08 am
Who is posing as me? Loser.
————————————
Does this mean loser = me = Michael Arrington? If so, I concur.
Damn…those free beta invites went fast! Sounds cool.
i tried to gte one but …already finished..
amazing service! thanks for the invite, works pretty good.
Cool Service. Hats off to zenbe for making our life easier.
not lucky to get invites
The zenpages are very interesting. It’s a step up from Gmail. I just wish they (anyone) would give us folders. I just wrote about my experience on my blog here… http://webpoet....even-seven-49b/
Did a little test run with zenbe and I’m hooked
I have to agree with #47, folders would be nice, or another way to segregate mails originating from other accounts.
My first impressions on zenbe: http://5thumbs..../zenbe-webmail/
I WANT THIS ON MY OWN SERVER, the companies i work with have gmail on their own account with their own domain, it’s not the best thing in the world as they tell me.
Why can’t they let us download this and use it on our own domain, you can lock the files so that you can put your own ads in it… i don’t care but it has to work on my server with with my @domain.com
I am soo far loving Zenbe myself tooo!!!
sent from: fav.or.it [FID388594]