An Official Renzoo Blog

According to a recent survey by Webcredible email is the most desired service for UK mobile phone users. Out of 1010 mobile phone users questioned 33% stated that mobile email would be their number one priority followed by 25% of the votes for social networking. Read the full story Mobile Email Beats Social Networking.

I just wonder if 33% (these figures are even higher in some other European countries) of mobile users want email on their phone why only fewer than 1%, with most of them already having email capable phone, actively use mobile email?

We got first feedbacks about the new Renzoo and we’ve rushed to improve some UI which has shown to be most confusing. Some of you might need to do Ctrl+F5 to clear the cash and for the new changes to take effect.

1. An important change was made in the sign up process where entry of mobile number is now optional. This will still need to be supplied later if you decide to use Renzoo mobile alerts. If you are just accessing your emails via mobile browser or leveraging other email to sms alert service, registration of mobile number is not required.
2. The biggest change was made to Settings->Alerts section which we split into three subsections in order to present Alert config data in a clearer way with better explanation of Alert actions.
3. Setting of mobile phone number and an alternative alert service email address has been moved from My Account to more natural Settings ->Alerts page.

Here’s the PR that went out this morning http://www.prweb.com/releases/2007/11/prweb566459.htm

Even though setting up Renzoo is easy I’ll briefly run through the basic steps that are necessary to start getting your mail on the go.

Getting Started with Renzoo

I’ll presume that you have already successfully signed up for the service.

1. Add Email Accounts that you wish to access from your mobile. In most cases it should be enough to enter your mailbox’s email address and password. Renzoo will try to find the rest of your provider’s server details automatically. If it can’t find them you’ll have the option to enter them yourself. Choose how often you wish your mailbox to be checked for new emails and save. That’s it! You are now setup to start getting alerts and accessing emails on your mobile.
2. Renzoo default behaviour is that all emails that arrive to any of your registered mailboxes will send alerts to your mobile. That’s not necessarily what you might want. This is where mobile rules are helpful. You can define rules as which emails will send alerts e.g. only urgent emails or emails from your spouse etc. You can still access all other emails from your mobile but alerts will be sent only for mails that match the specified rule criteria.
3. You control when alerts are active by setting days of week and time, manually enabling/disabling them or selecting automatic presence control. With presence controlled alerts Renzoo uses Skype status to sense when you are away from the computer to activate alerts. Presence control currently supports only Skype for Windows (other IM/Chat clients will be added soon). For this to work you’ll need to install a plugin, downloadable from the Alerts section when Presence alert control selected.

Renzoo has been live for over a year now and we have users from over 50 countries. Thanks to all of you who use the service and from your valuable feedbacks we have learned that in the Web world MORE is LESS and LESS is MORE. To live in line with this mantra we have decided to scale down the existing Renzoo service and focus on a feature that proved to be most attractive of all, the mobile email (RenzooExpress). As a result we have simplified Renzoo in order to create a really useful mobile email service that is above all very simple to use.

The current Renzoo users can still access and use old Renzoo in the same way from the new url address http://old.renzoo.co.uk

New Renzoo Sneak Preview

Our ambition was to create the simplest true push mobile email service that didn’t require software downloads or phone setup and that could be used from any ordinary WAP enabled mobile phone. Here are some of the new Renzoo changes that we will be blogging about in more details soon:

• Quick and easy activation.
• Full email functionality including viewing of popular attachments, forward and reply.
• True push mail functionality via SMS/WAP alerts.
• Support for popular mail services such as Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, and many others.
• “Single click” enable/disable control for email alerting from both Web and mobile phone.
• Presence control that allows automatic activation of alerting when on the go. Renzoo uses an IM (chat) client status to sense when user is away from her computer.
• FREE email alerts via Email to SMS services.
• Rules to control which emails will initiate mobile alerts.

Stay tuned for more news to come soon.