The Zenbe mail interface

After weeks of waiting, Zenbe.com finally sent me a confirmation for an account request. Was it worth the wait? Sort of. It’s nice, but if your primary email is Gmail like mine is, it’s just different. Which is good, I suppose.

Design

Clearly, a lot of thought and work went into the design of Zenbe. It feels fresh and well put-together. Things are intuitively arranged, cool colours, rounded corners etc. There are, however, some bits that can be confusing. For example, the “Settings” dialog is just for your email accounts. Other settings are done through the Gear icon, which changes function based on context. In the calendar, it gives you options for the calendar. Logical, but it took me a while to figure out. Another minor niggle I found was that buttons are just text-based on top of the message view. I’m sort of used to having a trashcan icon around to delete things.

The sidebar is a plus. I say this because it is not something I immediately want to get rid of, as I do in most other apps. It holds your calendar, contact list, to-dos, twitter, facebook and google chat tabs. I’m not super-excited about the whole “social” angle, but I suspect with more use, I’ll begin to appreciate having everything in a single browser window.

Conversation view is also nice, in an iChat sort of way. Gmail has done this forever, but the presentation in Zenbe is more literal.

Features

Zenbe has lots of features. Conceivably, it could grow to become a complete PIM solution. I’m not organised enough to know the difference between two online calendars, but Zenbe includes one, and it works fine. It also shows up in your sidebar, so that’s convenient. I haven’t explored the system enough to know whether it has any neat tricks like creating meetings out of emails, but if it isn’t already there, it probably will be eventually.

An interesting feature is “ZenPages”, which are collations of events, discussions, email, files and to-dos. ZenPages can be shared with anyone, even people without Zenbe accounts. A bit like the “Sites” feature in Google Apps, but much more accessible, since it’s available on a tab right in your email view. I’ve begun using it to track things about a couple of projects. Just having shared email on a ZenPage is reason enough to try it.

Attachments get special treatment in Zenbe, with a dedicated “Files” tab in the main view. This shows you all the recent attachments you may have received in your email. A nice touch. I routinely rifle through email to find and refer to documents. The files tab saves a few steps in search. File previews are available on hover (at least for images) and documents open in a pop-up window that uses Scribd to display the attachment. It works well, if slightly slowly. I would think that files would have links back to the email, but this is not the case. A glaring omission, I thought. This would essentially make the “Files” tab a list of email sorted by attachment, but not being able to find the email containing an attachment just seems counterintuitive.

Like Gmail, Zenbe uses tags to organise your email. This was familiar and comfortable for me, and I was pleased with the implementation. To tag a message, you can do it the Gmail way, or simply click on the tag on the left sidebar. A tag can even be set to automatically archive, which is what I like to do with press releases. Select, click, gone. This alone is a good enough reason for me to use Zenbe as my mail front-end.

Technical

Mail front-end is probably a good way to describe Zenbe, since it doesn’t require you to switch to a new email account (though you get that by default). Zenbe polls your other POP3 accounts and brings them into your Inbox, letting you keep your “From:” header. It does this smartly—like Gmail—so I can poll my personal and work email and reply to it without any extra steps. This will work fine for most people, but it doesn’t for my slightly elongated chain of email (personal gmail forwards to google apps polled by Zenbe).

POP3 implies timed polling. Zenbe polls fast enough for my email needs, but I’m sure there’s a delay somewhere in the chain. I didn’t notice, so I don’t care. I did notice that Zenbe is able to pull in my Sent items as well—I don’t know how it does this over POP3. This is very useful with the conversation view, since I can continue using my gmail/google apps/work email on my iPhone as separate accounts, and get a nice consolidated view in Zenbe.

The system also provides POP3 and limited IMAP access to your Zenbe mail. I briefly considered getting rid of the multiple accounts on my iPhone and just accessing Zenbe through IMAP, but even though Zenbe can intelligently manage multiple accounts, the iPhone can’t. I’d have to stick with one “Reply-to”, which is unacceptable. Under the circumstances, Zenbe must remain solely my desktop front-end.

Wishlist and conclusions

I like Zenbe so far. I’d like to continue using it. It makes keeping your inbox empty quite easy. I hope it extends to mobile handsets soon—a simpler web interface perhaps? SyncML would be nice too. Better, consistent keyboard shortcuts would help (ESC doesn’t always work as expected).