Enlighten your email

It is attractive enough to fall in love with at first sight. But there’s more to this new kid on the block than good looks.

Zenbe is a stand-alone webmail solution, and as such a direct competitor of the established giants:  Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. While some are skeptical vis-a-vis its long-term success, everyone who used Zenbe found it simply dazzling.

And, like we said, it is not only because of the beautiful interface.  Zenbe is also endowed with delightful features.  It lets you fetch emails from your other accounts and centralise them in one place. It gives you a calendar, task list and address book, always present in your sidebar.  It lets you organize messages and attachments with tags. It even lets you star your messages with – wait for it – differently coloured stars.

But what really sets Zenbe apart is the feature called Zen Pages. That’s where you put specific emails, or files you uploaded form your computer, to create shareable pages: to-do list page, appointments list page, family photos page, next braai get-together page, your bidorbuy presence page, and so on.

Yes, you’ve heard it right: Zen pages can be shared. Anyone you invite – whether they have a Zenbi email account or not – can view them. The people you invite can in their turn share relevant messages using the same Zen Page. To be fair, we must point out that not everyone is happy with this feature. Thus a miffed blogger complains: “Now instead of the ‘Honey can you do this for me’ and me saying ‘Yea, sure I can’, and then we all forget about it later, my wife will be able to send me a to-do list and keep track of what I did and didn’t do. This is a”great” idea guys! You ruined my life and lives of other hopeless men out there.”

Everyone else can go to www.zenbe.com and ask to be invited to Zenbe.

Update: Zenbe Mail, Zenbe’s original product, was discontinued in October 2010, following an acquistion by Facebook. Zenbe went on to focus on building applications and collaboration tools.