Zoho Mail Launches with Offline and Mobile support
Over the past three years, we launched several new applications in Zoho, but one particular application has been in the background silently making progress during its private-beta stage - Zoho Mail.
Today, Zoho Mail is stepping out of private-beta. This is an important milestone for Zoho as Zoho Mail plays a pivotal role as our suite evolves. There is lot to talk about, so let us drill down into details.
For Individuals:
If you are an individual using Zoho, you can visit http://mail.zoho.com and you'll notice that you already have a Zoho Mail account waiting for you. All Zoho users gets an email address <username>@zoho.com. We decided to give @zoho.com email addresses to our users while we keep @zohocorp.com for ourselves.
Zoho Mail can also act as an email client. Apart from your Zoho account, you can also configure it to send and receive emails from other POP Accounts (IMAP is coming soon).
Zoho Mail (like all other Zoho Apps) is Ad free and also has no storage limit.
For Businesses:
Zoho Mail is build for business use. If you are looking for a feature-rich web-based email solution, Zoho Mail is built for you. Businesses can use Zoho Mail (through Zoho Business) to host your emails. In this case, Zoho Mail can act as your mail server hosting emails for your business providing email addresses for your domain.
About 900 of us at AdventNet have been using Zoho Mail exclusively for the last 6 months. We wanted to be comfortable before we roll it out to our businesses.
Features Instead of talking about all the features in Zoho Mail, I'll share the approach we have taken in Zoho Mail and let you explore all the features.
Zoho Mail supports folders (including hierarchical folders) - the ones you are used to. But then, we also see the value of having Labels in your mail client. So we added labels support too. We don't want to decide what you should use. We want to give you the choice. So we added support for both Folders and Labels.
Along the same lines, we noticed that some users prefer seeing a list of their emails serially (Ex: the Outlook style) and some users prefer viewing the emails as conversations (Ex: Gmail style). Again, we don't want to decide what you have to use. So we support both. In conversations, responses are listed hierarchically so that you can look at a conversation and visually see who responded to whom.
These are couple of examples on the approach we used for Zoho Mail. We do support all the common features you'd expect from an email system. I included the list of supported features in this document.
Zoho Mail also has Zoho Chat Integrated. We understand that you spend most of the time in your email app. It is important to have Chat integrated right into it. You'll find the same version of Zoho Chat integrated with other applications like Zoho Business, Zoho Docs etc.
Offline Support
Zoho Mail also supports Offline mode. This means you can access your email when not connected to the internet. Like Zoho Writer, this functionality is built using Google Gears.
To use Zoho Mail in offline mode, you'll notice the 'Setup Offline' link on the top. You'll need Google Gears installed on your browser (IE & Firefox are supported currently) to use offline support. Once you permit access, your mails will be accessible offline. You can choose to download images & attachments as well in the offline mode.
Zoho Mail automatically detects your connectivity and switches to online/offline modes seamlessly. While offline, you can respond to your emails as you would normally. When you go back online these emails will be sent out from your Outbox.
He had a chat with Brad Neuberg from Google Gears team regarding offline support.
Mobile Support
Zoho Mail is also available on iPhone. If you login to zoho.com from your iPhone, you'll find the mobile version of Zoho Mail optimized for iPhone. We do plan to support other mobile devices soon.
Over the next few weeks we will be talking in detail about some of the key features in Zoho Mail. Meanwhile, please do give Zoho Mail a spin and let us know your feedback.
