When we first looked at Zenbe two months ago, the service was still in private beta. Now anyone can sign up for Zenbe. The company has also added several new features that help transform the service from a simple webmail client to a personalized start page.
For example, you can now sign into Google Talk and Twitter in the Quick View area on the right side of the page. This lets you chat with your contacts without leaving the email/calendar client. You can update your twitter status or read updates from your contacts.
Zenbe has also created a new email notification script for Firefox, redesigned the task list, and added buttons for easily deleting all items in your deleted and spam folders. Zenbe also says it's working on adding a Gmail-style conversation e-mail view, and is working to add IMAP support.
On July 11th, Zenbe will also be launching an iPhone list application. This is described as the company's first foray into bringing Zenbe to a mobile platform, so we expect we'll see a full Zenbe client for the iPhone and other mobile devices in the future.
The email subject line. The bane of our existence. Back when Download Squad was just a wee little blog, we used to communicate the old fashioned way, by sending letters in the mail and waiting a week for them to arrive. It may not have been the most efficient way to keep in touch, but at least we didn't have to write subject lines.
Fortunately, Yahoo! has a hidden feature designed for the creativity-challenged. Can't come up with a clever or appropriate subject line for that email you're about to send? Just hit the subject button in the new version of Yahoo! Mail. Yahoo! will throw in a quote, funny phrase, or who knows what?
Here are just a few of the things that we found. Keep in mind, somebody must have taken the time to actually type these in there.
Do you use them for good, or for awesome?
I'm out of my mind, but feel free to leave a message.
Hazards of storing plutonium in Tupperware
Why does Chinese food always taste better in front of a computer?
Have you ever had one of those days when you can't seem to get your computer to do anything you want it to? Say you want to download Windows Movie Maker, so you go to the Microsoft web site, check out the download page, and simply can't find it anywhere. When you do finally find it after performing a search, the page times out before you can download it. And once you've finally managed to get it on your PC, the installation process is excruciating.
It turns out you're not the only person who has trouble getting Windows to do what you want it to. The above scenerio is described in great detail in an email Bill Gates sent in 2003. This letter was released to the public along with a huge pile of other communications as part of the antitrust litigation Microsoft's been involved in for the past few years. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has posted the text of the entire email, but here are a few of our favorite parts:
Gates seems infuriated that it takes so long for Microsoft web pages to load
He had no idea why he would have to use Windows Update to install additional software before he could install Windows Movie Maker
His computer was unuseable for 6 minutes while applying updates
He asked why he should have to reboot his machine, which he reboots every night
Upon installing Movie Maker, Gates checks the add/remove programs dialog to see if it shows up, and instead he finds a list of programs with obscure names like Windows XP Hotfix Q329048. hHe writes "Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable?" he asked. "The file system is no longer usable, the registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place, but now it is all crapped up."
There are plenty of ways to get a custom email address. You can sign up for service with Mail.com and choose from a number of custom domains. Or you can register a domain and use Google Apps to link it with an email account for free. But if you're a Yahoo! Mail fan, you might find that getting the domain name you want isn't the hard part. It's getting the prefix.
About 266 million people use Yahoo! Mail, which means the odds of getting an address like john@yahoo.com are pretty poor at this point. Today Yahoo! made things a bit easier by opening up two new domains, @ymail.com and @rocketmail.com.
If RocketMail sounds familiar, that's because it's the name of a company that Yahoo! purchased in 1997. The first version of Yahoo! Mail was built on technology developed by RocketMail earlier in the 1990s. You can snag an account using one of the new domains by visiting the new signup page.
A NYT article says that Americans waste $650 BILLION dollars over-checking their email obsessively. BILLION. Not Millions. Not Thousands. BILLIONS. Crazier? We waste $650 BILLION dollars trying to get back into the groove of work after checking our email obsessively.
Why do we do it? Are we that afraid of missing something?
Some of us here can say that we too check our email obsessively. Even going so far as to click on the Gmail logo over and over to refresh the page. Does this sound familiar to you? If so, you're apparently not alone.
How do we stop? How do we combat this problem? Do we love email that much? We hear people complaining all of the time about information and email overload, so maybe we're trying to get a jump on controlling it before it controls us?
Many questions and not a lot of answers, but if these numbers from the NYT are true, oh boy do we have to change some things.
First things first.
Stop. Look, and Listen.
Stop checking your email so often
Look and notice that Gmail already refreshes itself
Listen for emails to come in automatically via POP or IMAP
You won't miss something.
What's your favorite way to catch email? We find that checking email on the mobile slows us down a bit. Unless you get too obsessed with that...can you say Crackberry?
Tired of getting email notifications letting you know that someone wants to be your friend, poke, or wink at you? Webmail provider Orgoo wants to bridge the gap between email and social networking. That means you'd be able to receive all of your email notifications without leaving the social networking site. TechCrunch reports that Orgoo hopes to convince social networks like MySpace and Facebook to integrate the Orgoo email interface, which will also encourage users to spend more time on the web page.
While most social networking sites have some sort of private messaging feature, they tend to lack the features you'd find in a full fledged email service like Gmail or Yahoo! Mail. Orgoo supports POP and IMAP, which means you wouldn't necessarily be stuck with an @orgoo.com or @myspace.com email address. You could link any POP or IMAP-enabled account to the service.
Last year Yahoo! made some waves by claiming that email itself could be the basis for the next generation social networking. The implication is that Yahoo! may add social features to its email and IM services to make Yahoo! Mail a bit more Facebook-like. Orgoo's solution seems to achieve the same goal by taking the exact opposite approach.
Online document sharing service Docstoc has launched a new product that lets you email files that exceed your email service provider's file size limits. Docstoc OneClick is a desktop application that lets you upload files up to 50MB to Docstoc with a little right-click magic.
Just select the file you want to email and Docstoc OneClick will upload it in the background and open up an email window complete with a link to the file. The recipient of the email will be able to either view your file online using the Docstoc viewer or download the file. You can make any file public or private.
Right now Docstoc OneClick is Windows only, but a Mac version is coming soon. There doesn't seem to be a way to configure OneClick to work with a web-based email service like Gmail or Yahoo! Mail. So when it launches an email Windows, it will load up whatever Windows thinks is your default email application, which might be Outlook, Outlook Express, or Thunderbird.
Docstoc OneClick doesn't work with all file types, just documents like Word, Excel, or PDF files. You cannot upload media files. File transfer service YouSendIt offers a similar application, but without the limitations on file types, and with a higher file size limit. But the advantage to using Docstoc is that users can view documents without downloading them.
You've been left behind (YBLB) is a new service to help you say "I told you so" to your friends and loved ones who don't make it with you during the Rapture. Rather than letting them figure out on their own that you've made it and they didn't, YBLB sends them an email from you so you can be sure to get the last word.
If nonnynonnybooboo isn't your style, your note could instead continue to harass encourage them to live their life the way you chose to live yours. You might also want to send them information as to the future hell they are about to endure and as YBLB so eloquently puts it, help "snatch them from the flames."
For just $40 for the first year, you get all this to help you stick it to your loved ones:
Store up to 250mb of documents
Send to up to 62 individual email addresses
150Mb encrypted document storage
100mb unencrypted document storage
You can edit documents any time
Write your own documents or choose from some of YBLB
Now, you might be wondering how YBLB will send the emails out since they're going to the Rapture party too. Well they came up with an ingenious solution - when 3 out of their 5 team members fail to log in over a 3 day period it will trigger the emails to be sent but, and here's the clever part, the system waits another 3 days to ensure no false triggers.
You've just got to hope the fab 5 of YBLB don't all get together and somehow aren't able to get online for 6 days pre-Rapture. That could be a very big oops.
Want a custom email address that looks a bit more professional than username@yahoo.com? Email service provider Mail.com provides users with a chance to pick from dozens of available domain names. That means you can get a free email account like user@techie.com, user@tokyo.com, user@doctor.com, or of course, user@mail.com.
You can choose from a number of categories, like top choices, academic, cities, countries, hobbies, jobs, locations, and miscellaneous.
Once you sign up for a free account, you get 3GB of storage, an address book, and calendar. In theory, if you don't like the Mail.com email service, you could just forward all of your email to your email provider of choice. But there's a catch. Free accounts don't support forwarding. If you pony up $3.95/month or $29.99/year you can get a get a premium account with unlimited storage and email forwarding.
For some baffling reason, Gmail still doesn't officially support HTML signatures. In other words, you can't add links, graphics, or adjust your fonts.
There are a handful of Greasemonkey scripts that add support for HTML signatures, and the latest version of Better Gmail also lets you create HTML signatures without installing Greasemonkey. But what if you don't want your signature to show up on every single message? Or what if you want to create multiple signatures that you can use in different situations?
GeekFG has developed a web service that lets you create and HTML signature and then save it as a browser bookmarklet. All you have to do is click on the bookmarklet when composing a Gmail message in Firefox or Internet Explorer and your signature will be added.
This utility comes from the same guy who brought us DomainFinder, a web service that lets you break up any word or phrase into possible domain names like downlo.ad/squad or downloadsq.ua/d.
Sure, Gmail's been in beta since is launched almost four years ago. But you know that Google has thoroughly tested the email service at this point. And before publicly rolling out any features, the company conducts thorough internal tests. But now Google is getting ready to let the general public get in on the action with the launch of Gmail Labs.
Here's how it works. Starting tonight at 6pm PST, you should notice a new tab in your Gmail settings marked "Labs." When you click that tab, you'll have the option of adding new beta services that have not yet been extensively tested. As of tonight, there should be about 13 new features, including:
A tool that lets you bookmark specific gmail messages
Superatars tool that lets you choose custom stars to label your mail
Mouse Gestures
See profile pictures in Gmail chat
An "email addict" option that lets you ban yourself from checking your email for 15 minutes
Right now all of the features will be created by Gmail engineers, but eventually Google may open the project so that third parties can create Gmail features that will be available to the general public. In the meantime, anyone can send feedback to the developers behind each add-on. Eventually the most popular add-ons will be added to Gmail.
One of the most valuable features of any good email or IM service is the contact list. Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, and other companies that provide online communication tools also give you a place to store information about your friends, family, colleagues, and people who you met years ago and have completely forgotten about.
Yahoo! is making that much more useful by launching the Yahoo! Address Book API, which will let 3rd party developers create applications that can interact with your contact list. For example, you can use the API to develop an application that will scan your contact list to find other users who already belong to the social network you're signing up for, or a list of people you may want to invite. The API also supports contact synchronization, which could come in handy if you want to develop a tool that syncs online contact lists with Outlook or Thunderbird.
The API also provides the ability to create, modify, or delete contact information, which sounds a litle scary. But Yahoo! says write-acess is "available on a case by case basis," so developers will need to contact Yahoo! before creating a utility that has the ability to wipe out your address book.
Plaxo and LinkedIn have been using the API for a while, but Yahoo! is launching it publicly today.
DownloadSquad reader Leni Mayo sent us a hot little tip. He has written a script called Zindus for Thunderbird which syncs Google contacts with the address book. It works on version 3.0a as well he says.
Here's a list of the fields that you'll be able to move from Google to Thunderbird:
Full Name
Primary Email address and Second Email address
Phone Numbers: Home, Work, Work Fax, Pager, Mobile
Instant Messaging (AIM)
Company and Title
Notes
There's a few caveats because Google handles contacts differently, so go check out Zindus homepage for a full explanation. It's worth it if you're a die-hard Thunderbirder.
iContact is a lightweight Windows XP/Vista application that lets you import your Gmail contacts to your desktop. So if you don't have Excel and can't open an exported CSV file, this will work perfectly.
By clicking on a contact's name, it will start up your email software of choice as it should. It also brings down photos, Skype information, and address information to look people and places up on Google Maps.
Neato.
The developers plan on allowing you to bring in more contacts down the pike, like your poor lost MSN and Yahoo! souls.
You simply put in your Gmail login/password and it syncs up in seconds. Search for contacts and set it to open on Windows startup and it'll get your latest and greatest webgirlfriends or boyfriends contact info.
It's free, and it gets the job done if you want to keep your Gmail contacts safe on any one of your 59 computers.
Although Mail Badger sounds like a small woodland creature trained to deliver packages, it's actually an OS X app that allows you to add extra badges to the Apple Mail dock icon. For some people, it's good enough to have one single red badge, proudly displaying the number of unread messages from all their email accounts. The developers of Mail Badger didn't want to stop there: why not have a different badge for each account?
Once installed, Mail Badger lives in your Apple Mail preferences. There are a few preset shapes - hearts, stars, circles and the default starburst. You can adjust the color, size and font on these easily, and even upload your own. For power users, Mail Badger will assign a badge for messages that meet search criteria you specify, and it will also badge the results of an AppleScript. This app is definitely worth installing for anyone who keeps mail across more than one folder or account.
Check this out y'all:
