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HEY looked interesting until I found out they don't support IMAP. When I think about the problems with email, I don't think primarily about the interface, but a

HEY looked interesting until I found out they don't support IMAP. When I think about the problems with email, I don't think primarily about the interface, but about the fact that the open standards on which it is based are increasingly being ignored.

agloeregrets 6y ago
That’s all super fair, but they also argue this direction allows them to innovate as well. Notably, their direction resembles a rails approach and lets the server do more work. (Because Hey is instead just a standard API client, whereas the client can tell the server things that you just can’t do with IMAP.) I imagine with the Apple situation they are working on adding support currently however, even if it’s reduced. They need an iOS plan B.
- HeXetic 6y ago
  What do you think they can do with their custom API that IMAP can't? IMAP has server-side search and a file-based representation of things like configuration. It may not be as easy to write as a JSON API, but once you do, the interface is flexible enough to really accomplish anything.
  - dewey 6y ago
    Their whole "filtering everything out until you whitelist the sender" approach which is the one feature that sets HEY apart from the other providers wouldn't really work with normal IMAP. As for IMAP with more JSON there would also be Fastmails https://jmap.io/ https://jmap.io/
    - zimpenfish 6y ago
      > Their whole "filtering everything out until you whitelist the sender" approach Unless I'm missing something about what they're doing, this is a basic SIEVE script that filters anything not explicitly whitelisted into a folder.
      - dewey 6y ago
        This has a bit of a "I can build Dropbox with a bunch of shell scripts over the weekend" vibe. I'm sure there's a bit more to it than that. How would you whitelist things in your regular IMAP client? Manually moving things to the IMAP Inbox and which then marks them as whitelisted somehow? You could probably build that with a bunch of hacks but you'll not get a polished consumer friendly feature out of that. They are not in competition with people running mutt and a bunch of custom scripts, it's more of an alternative for people using Gmail with Gmail apps currently and don't even know what's IMAP.
        hayyyyydos 6y ago
        > How would you whitelist things in your regular IMAP client? Manually moving things to the IMAP Inbox and which then marks them as whitelisted somehow? That's exactly how you'd do it, and the functionality definitely exists - all handled on the server side. See: learning spam from ham by dragging to/from the spam folder. https://wiki.dovecot.org/Pigeonhole/Sieve/Plugins/IMAPSieve https://wiki.dovecot.org/Pigeonhole/Sieve/Plugins/IMAPSieve
        dewey 6y ago
        I wasn't trying to say that this method would be hard or impossible to build, but it's hard to use for the average user. Moving mails around on mobile apps is already annoying enough (At least in the iOS Mail.app)
        zimpenfish 6y ago
        > How would you whitelist things in your regular IMAP client? If I were building it for my parents, I'd say "anything in Pending/Held/StrangerDanger that you flag will be whitelisted and will be in the Inbox from then on". Flagging a message on iOS Mail is pretty straightforward - swipe+tap or long-press+tap+tap and easy enough conceptually as a "this is good" action, I think? Backend picks up the flag change, adds the address to the inbox, strips the flag, and moves that message to the inbox. Add "move it to junk to undo the whitelisting" for completion (also easy on iOS Mail). Perhaps not as polished as writing a custom app to do it, no, but it seems fairly consumer friendly to me?
    - HeXetic 6y ago
      The server can put messages into whatever folders it wants. Different folders can even put the same message into multiple meta-folders. The whitelist can be stored as a message (as basically a file) in a config folder. This is pretty straightforward IMAP. Again I'm not arguing that IMAP isn't creaky and clumsy but let's not pretend that lack of power is the reason they didn't use it.
  - bradly 6y ago
    Can IMAP snooze messages?
    - zimpenfish 6y ago
      That'd be down to the IMAP server to support, I suspect, but you could certainly have one that understood the logic - "if there's a message in Snoozed and it's older than X, move it to Inbox". If you have access to your mail, you could do it yourself with a shell script and cron.
- alexwennerberg 6y ago
  > That’s all super fair, but they also argue this direction allows them to innovate as well. That's true, but I would argue, perhaps somewhat conservatively, that email is an area where we don't want or need much innovation. Email works fine and has for decades. In many cases, "innovation" (except at the protocol level) has made things worse.
  - swyx 6y ago
    I mean, good for you, but all that proves is that you're not their target audience.
    - alexwennerberg 6y ago
      I believe that there is such a thing as good, responsible engineering practices, such as supporting open standards, that companies ought to to irrespective of "target audience". I'm not saying using IMAP is a better user experience and that everyone should use it, but I believe that any email provider has a responsibility to support IMAP.
  - imchillyb 6y ago
    I would argue that their non-standard implementation will make transitioning away from their service impossibly difficult. The fact they don't support the widely supported IMAP means no easy way to move away. This is vendor lock-in to their walled-garden. This approach should be killed, dead, before it ever makes it to the end user.
    - bronson 6y ago
      Transitioning away sounds easy: https://hey.com/faqs/#if-i-don-t-like-hey-can-i-export-my-email-and-contacts https://hey.com/faqs/#if-i-don-t-like-hey-can-i-export-my-em...
      - wolco 6y ago
        Lifetime forwarding if someone has a paid account? This will change in time. I wouldn't rely on it.
- maxsilver 6y ago
  > They need an iOS plan B. I hope they don't. Apple needs to feel the pain their evil and immoral behaviour is inflicting on the world. In a perfect world, the government would force them to behave ethically. Absent that, Hey's stance here is the next best thing. If folks like Basecamp don't start standing up to Apple, then nothing stops Apple from just outright killing the majority of mobile software development. And while it's not directly their fault, at some point iPhone users need to recognize that their purchase of an iPhone is directly funding the destruction of the innovative / creative software they claim to want to have. If you like Hey, maybe stop buying a phone that's trying to murder Hey. If you run a company like Hey, maybe stop giving in to the mafia's extortion demands.
  - thatguy0900 6y ago
    I wonder if there's any single app company other than Google and Facebook that could take this stance and have Apple actually care. It's definitely not hey though.
    - maxsilver 6y ago
      > It's definitely not hey though. For Hey alone, agreed. I don't think they have enough clout. But Hey is a cool/popular new thing. If the next 20 coolest newest things also skip Apple as well (because Apple continues this grossly unethical behaviour) then Apple iPhones might lose their largely-unearned reputation as the place where the coolest/most-polished apps live. It doesn't necessarily have to be a huge multinational corporate stance to make this painful. It just has to be enough of the trendiest new things people want.
  - rockwotj 6y ago
    > In a perfect world, the government would force them to behave ethically. Absent that, Hey's stance here is the next best thing. In a perfect world there is a good enough iPhone competitor that would force Apple to behave better because otherwise companies wouldn't build apps on their platform.
ubermonkey 6y ago
Absolutely this. I've seen a bunch of "new takes" on email over the years, but none of them have been interesting to me because I don't want to run my mail on something goofy and proprietary that I can't easily and (mostly) painlessly migrate somewhere else. Also, I'm not sure email needs a "new take."
- m-p-3 6y ago
  It would be nice if IMAP received some extensions that makes it more up to par with proprietary mail services For example, a standardized method that allows you to tell your email server to send an email at a specific time.
  - wolco 6y ago
    That's not IMAP job that is a service on top.
grishka 6y ago
The unusual client UI is their main selling point, so this does make at least some sense. The defining open standard for email, SMTP, isn't ever going away.
- marcofiset 6y ago
  > The unusual client UI is their main selling point Exactly. That's why I'd like to use their app as an IMAP client to retrieve emails from my gmail account. Not the other way around.
wdr1 6y ago
Ironically, adding it would also fix their Apple store woes.

agloeregrets 6y ago

That’s all super fair, but they also argue this direction allows them to innovate as well. Notably, their direction resembles a rails approach and lets the server do more work. (Because Hey is instead just a standard API client, whereas the client can tell the server things that you just can’t do with IMAP.) I imagine with the Apple situation they are working on adding support currently however, even if it’s reduced. They need an iOS plan B.

HeXetic 6y ago
What do you think they can do with their custom API that IMAP can't? IMAP has server-side search and a file-based representation of things like configuration. It may not be as easy to write as a JSON API, but once you do, the interface is flexible enough to really accomplish anything.
- dewey 6y ago
  Their whole "filtering everything out until you whitelist the sender" approach which is the one feature that sets HEY apart from the other providers wouldn't really work with normal IMAP. As for IMAP with more JSON there would also be Fastmails https://jmap.io/ https://jmap.io/
  - zimpenfish 6y ago
    > Their whole "filtering everything out until you whitelist the sender" approach Unless I'm missing something about what they're doing, this is a basic SIEVE script that filters anything not explicitly whitelisted into a folder.
    - dewey 6y ago
      This has a bit of a "I can build Dropbox with a bunch of shell scripts over the weekend" vibe. I'm sure there's a bit more to it than that. How would you whitelist things in your regular IMAP client? Manually moving things to the IMAP Inbox and which then marks them as whitelisted somehow? You could probably build that with a bunch of hacks but you'll not get a polished consumer friendly feature out of that. They are not in competition with people running mutt and a bunch of custom scripts, it's more of an alternative for people using Gmail with Gmail apps currently and don't even know what's IMAP.
      - hayyyyydos 6y ago
        > How would you whitelist things in your regular IMAP client? Manually moving things to the IMAP Inbox and which then marks them as whitelisted somehow? That's exactly how you'd do it, and the functionality definitely exists - all handled on the server side. See: learning spam from ham by dragging to/from the spam folder. https://wiki.dovecot.org/Pigeonhole/Sieve/Plugins/IMAPSieve https://wiki.dovecot.org/Pigeonhole/Sieve/Plugins/IMAPSieve
        dewey 6y ago
        I wasn't trying to say that this method would be hard or impossible to build, but it's hard to use for the average user. Moving mails around on mobile apps is already annoying enough (At least in the iOS Mail.app)
      - zimpenfish 6y ago
        > How would you whitelist things in your regular IMAP client? If I were building it for my parents, I'd say "anything in Pending/Held/StrangerDanger that you flag will be whitelisted and will be in the Inbox from then on". Flagging a message on iOS Mail is pretty straightforward - swipe+tap or long-press+tap+tap and easy enough conceptually as a "this is good" action, I think? Backend picks up the flag change, adds the address to the inbox, strips the flag, and moves that message to the inbox. Add "move it to junk to undo the whitelisting" for completion (also easy on iOS Mail). Perhaps not as polished as writing a custom app to do it, no, but it seems fairly consumer friendly to me?
  - HeXetic 6y ago
    The server can put messages into whatever folders it wants. Different folders can even put the same message into multiple meta-folders. The whitelist can be stored as a message (as basically a file) in a config folder. This is pretty straightforward IMAP. Again I'm not arguing that IMAP isn't creaky and clumsy but let's not pretend that lack of power is the reason they didn't use it.
- bradly 6y ago
  Can IMAP snooze messages?
  - zimpenfish 6y ago
    That'd be down to the IMAP server to support, I suspect, but you could certainly have one that understood the logic - "if there's a message in Snoozed and it's older than X, move it to Inbox". If you have access to your mail, you could do it yourself with a shell script and cron.
alexwennerberg 6y ago
> That’s all super fair, but they also argue this direction allows them to innovate as well. That's true, but I would argue, perhaps somewhat conservatively, that email is an area where we don't want or need much innovation. Email works fine and has for decades. In many cases, "innovation" (except at the protocol level) has made things worse.
- swyx 6y ago
  I mean, good for you, but all that proves is that you're not their target audience.
  - alexwennerberg 6y ago
    I believe that there is such a thing as good, responsible engineering practices, such as supporting open standards, that companies ought to to irrespective of "target audience". I'm not saying using IMAP is a better user experience and that everyone should use it, but I believe that any email provider has a responsibility to support IMAP.
- imchillyb 6y ago
  I would argue that their non-standard implementation will make transitioning away from their service impossibly difficult. The fact they don't support the widely supported IMAP means no easy way to move away. This is vendor lock-in to their walled-garden. This approach should be killed, dead, before it ever makes it to the end user.
  - bronson 6y ago
    Transitioning away sounds easy: https://hey.com/faqs/#if-i-don-t-like-hey-can-i-export-my-email-and-contacts https://hey.com/faqs/#if-i-don-t-like-hey-can-i-export-my-em...
    - wolco 6y ago
      Lifetime forwarding if someone has a paid account? This will change in time. I wouldn't rely on it.
maxsilver 6y ago
> They need an iOS plan B. I hope they don't. Apple needs to feel the pain their evil and immoral behaviour is inflicting on the world. In a perfect world, the government would force them to behave ethically. Absent that, Hey's stance here is the next best thing. If folks like Basecamp don't start standing up to Apple, then nothing stops Apple from just outright killing the majority of mobile software development. And while it's not directly their fault, at some point iPhone users need to recognize that their purchase of an iPhone is directly funding the destruction of the innovative / creative software they claim to want to have. If you like Hey, maybe stop buying a phone that's trying to murder Hey. If you run a company like Hey, maybe stop giving in to the mafia's extortion demands.
- thatguy0900 6y ago
  I wonder if there's any single app company other than Google and Facebook that could take this stance and have Apple actually care. It's definitely not hey though.
  - maxsilver 6y ago
    > It's definitely not hey though. For Hey alone, agreed. I don't think they have enough clout. But Hey is a cool/popular new thing. If the next 20 coolest newest things also skip Apple as well (because Apple continues this grossly unethical behaviour) then Apple iPhones might lose their largely-unearned reputation as the place where the coolest/most-polished apps live. It doesn't necessarily have to be a huge multinational corporate stance to make this painful. It just has to be enough of the trendiest new things people want.
- rockwotj 6y ago
  > In a perfect world, the government would force them to behave ethically. Absent that, Hey's stance here is the next best thing. In a perfect world there is a good enough iPhone competitor that would force Apple to behave better because otherwise companies wouldn't build apps on their platform.

ubermonkey 6y ago

Absolutely this. I've seen a bunch of "new takes" on email over the years, but none of them have been interesting to me because I don't want to run my mail on something goofy and proprietary that I can't easily and (mostly) painlessly migrate somewhere else. Also, I'm not sure email needs a "new take."

m-p-3 6y ago
It would be nice if IMAP received some extensions that makes it more up to par with proprietary mail services For example, a standardized method that allows you to tell your email server to send an email at a specific time.
- wolco 6y ago
  That's not IMAP job that is a service on top.

grishka 6y ago

The unusual client UI is their main selling point, so this does make at least some sense. The defining open standard for email, SMTP, isn't ever going away.

marcofiset 6y ago
> The unusual client UI is their main selling point Exactly. That's why I'd like to use their app as an IMAP client to retrieve emails from my gmail account. Not the other way around.

wdr1 6y ago

Ironically, adding it would also fix their Apple store woes.