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(Wow. Pictures on the blog! Somebody give an Amen!)

Somebody twittered about Zenbe.com the other day. There are so many new applications and services out there that I barely ever give them the time of day. But for some reason I clicked. I think that reason was because somebody said it was “email for social media” or some such nonsense. I was curious as to what that would look like. And when they said I could keep my current email address, I was convinced to give it a look-see.

The simple interface impressed me. It seems to take the “don’t give your users stuff they don’t need until they actually need it” approach. I like the fact that it easily integrates with Twitter and Facebook. It’s so nice to have that all in one place. And let’s face it. It’s just nice to have a new way of looking at your email. Even Mac Mail gets a little boring.

So I was tweeting my little heart out about how great Zenbe was, and then I got a little deeper. How many people out there use rules to organize your email? Am I the only hardcore user of email rules?

Anyway, I tried to set up my rules (I was about to be committed to this thing), and then the weirdest thing happened. I set up a rule for certain emails to be tagged “clients”, which was fine. Then I set up another rule that was tagged “urgent”. It actually tagged it both “clients” and “urgent”. And on and on until every rule had the tag I specified, plus all of the tags I had used since I logged in. Weird. After messing with it for a long time, I’ve concluded that the rules function in Zenbe is possessed. At least in Firefox.

But the good news actually far outweighs the bad. Everything is exactly where you would think it should be. The interface is very intuitive, and the features are extremely useful. I especially loves the task lists, the way the calendar is integrated, and the files panel (it collects all of the files you’ve been emailed in one place – automatically). And the environment is just plain nice.

All in all, I think it could be a really great application. Anything that integrates a lot of those things that I do on a daily basis is fantastic in my book. I think I’m willing to stick the rules issue through and see if it isn’t fixed in future upgrades. But I’m not totally ditching my Mac Mail yet. Almost, but not quite.