11 ms·

Saying Good Bye to Hey.com

202 points by tachyons 5y ago

eastern 5y ago
I too paid for one year of Hey and it delivered a genuine surprise for me: a renewed appreciation of Gmail ;-)
- arcturus17 5y ago
  Oh shit… I use Gmail (personally and professionally) and these are some strong words - I don’t hate it but I certainly don’t like and cannot fathom what would make me suddenly appreciate it.
  - PascLeRasc 5y ago
    Simplify Gmail is pretty great, so is Mimestream. https://simpl.fyi/ https://simpl.fyi/ https://mimestream.com/ https://mimestream.com/
franz899 5y ago
I didn't renew mine either. My two main reasons are the mess they caused a few weeks ago and how bad the search is. HEY has a great feature that lets you merge multiple threads under one name, but they do not have a higher weight over any other email subject or body. I've found myself lost in a long list of non-relevant emails when searching for a merge thread name, having to scroll email after email; how can they not give a higher weight to a custom string that I chose? All of this on a less than one-year-old archive, I don't know how this system can work overtime.
- virgilp 5y ago
  Genuinely curious, why is "the mess they caused" a primary reason to leave the service? It feels like "even if the service was wonderful you'd still consider leaving because of <the mess>". What exactly makes you feel like that? (to clarify, it's not entirely clear to me what did DHH do wrong [+], let alone "so wrong that one would want to avoid Basecamp like the plague"). [+] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27003221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27003221
  - nindalf 5y ago
    We’ve been taught as consumers to vote with our wallets. I want to “vote” for the service that gives me the most satisfaction. And my satisfaction is impacted by financing people whom I dislike. Best part about this is that you can tell me I’m wrong and that I should only consider features and UX and what not but I don’t need to listen. I’ll vote the way that satisfies me. It’s a similar dynamic with voting for politicians. You might find a politician who promises to fulfil all your policy desires … while being an abhorrent person. Some might “hold their nose” and vote for this politician anyway, others might not. Neither is wrong. They’re both maximising their own satisfaction.
  - Lazare 5y ago
    Not the person you asked, but in my view: 1. There's a lot of products and teams out there, and your purchasing decisions help ensure some products and teams stick around and have more resources to keep doing what they're doing, and that other's don't. Imagine you want to buy a custom gizmo, and three vendors all seem equally good, but you notice one of them is also a contributor to an open source package you love. Why wouldn't you buy the gizmo from that guy? But the flip side of that is, if a vendor seems to be a jerk, and there's other equally good options... 2. Even beyond that, investing in a product, tool, platform, workflow, whatever has costs. If there's any signs that the people behind it are about to get acqui-hired and shut the product down, or are idiots who are running the product into the ground, or are terrible at security and are likely going to have a major breach...again, why wouldn't you jump ship? And here, we have a small company who just ran face first into a brick wall, picked themselves up, and then did it three more times, parleying a PR disaster into a bigger PR disaster, 1/3 of the company including tons of senior staff jumping ship, and then a another PR disaster as they got tarred in the court of public opinion as soft on white supremacists. They say that there's no such thing as bad PR, but I'd rather not watch a company who makes a tool I rely on test that theory. And certainly my estimate of Hey being around - or getting the resources it needs to keep improving - is a bit lower now than it was six months ago. 3. Also, the HR failures you are discussing in your linked comment are, I think, extremely clear. Is it actually wrong for the CEO to dig through archives to play gotcha games with staff members in order to publicly humiliate them in front of the whole company? ...yes. Yes it was. What was he supposed to do? ANYTHING BUT THAT. I don't think this is really a complicated question.
jakeva 5y ago
In recommending Fastmail > Less opinionated of course, but you get more work done. It seems like a harsh take to me. Putting aside the philosophy of work as a virtue, I have also had Fastmail for many years and it's not much different than Gmail or Yahoo or any other service I've had. What I like about Hey.com is that I feel supported in my decision to just fucking block things I didn't ask for, or don't remember asking for, or just don't want anymore. It invites me to block them. but that's just me
Wiegand36 5y ago
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bnt 5y ago
(Maybe) not in particular related to Hey.com, but I'm worried about the amount of people (apparently 50%) who left Basecamp, and how that will reflect on the future development of their services (Basecamp, Hey) but also on Ruby on Rails and the surrounding ecosystem (like Stimulus, Turbo etc). I'm one of those (rare?) folks who still think Rails is a fantastic framework and it suits most of my private projects just fine (I haven't felt the need for a SPA approach in my last 2 years) - but I'm now hesitant to start anything new on Rails because I don't know who will pick up maintenance of Stimulus, Turbo and multiple Rails gems.
- rikkipitt 5y ago
  DHH tweeted this today: https://world.hey.com/dhh/after-the-storm-9370f871 https://world.hey.com/dhh/after-the-storm-9370f871 Sounds like they've hired new staff so hopefully there wont be too much disruption in the maintenance of these packages.
- jw1224 5y ago
  > I'm worried about the amount of people (apparently 50%) who left Basecamp Are you saying Basecamp lost half its users? Source?
  - detaro 5y ago
    they are talking about employees, not users. (no clue of the number is correct, I think I saw ~40% mentioned)
rikkipitt 5y ago
I'm thankful for Hey and the underlying work that is seeping back into Rails – specifically Action Mailbox. It has enabled me to create a product* that goes someway to helping with email burnout. In a nutshell: Programmable email addresses that you can make on the fly (or in advance). Each with an intrinsic timer/buffer that sends a single email containing all the messages received in that period. I.e. get one notification per day/week/month for a certain email or topic instead of a constant distracting stream of noise. * https://www.paced.email https://www.paced.email
- jes 5y ago
  Your service looks interesting. Can I trust that you’re not reading my email and selling or otherwise trading on information gleaned from it? I read your privacy policy. I didn’t see anything that explicitly ruled out my concern.
  - rikkipitt 5y ago
    Great question! I actually address this concern here: https://www.paced.email/docs/security https://www.paced.email/docs/security I’m going to surface this page a bit better soon as I’m currently developing a multi-tenancy feature along with branding improvements. Rikki
    - jes 5y ago
      No one. Your personal information and email routed through Paced Email via Mailgun are not sold, read, or shared with third-parties. I'm not in the business of selling your data. I appreciated the clarity of this. Thank you.
- jarek83 5y ago
  Out of curiosity, just trying to evaluate your service - how this is better from properly labelling emails in gmail?
yosito 5y ago
I'd love to see an email productivity tool that doesn't require me to switch email addresses and email providers. Sometimes a productivity paradigm works, sometimes it doesn't. The provider I choose depends more on things like security, privacy, reliability and cost. My email addresses are a catch all tied to my domain, and ideally never change. I don't want to have to switch providers and email addresses just to test if a different productivity paradigm works for me.
- rikkipitt 5y ago
  Some clever customers of my email productivity tool (mentioned above) had a similar sentiment. They figured out a way to forward their emails to my service thereby keeping both separate and still benefitting from my tool. It prompted me to write up a how-to for Gmail which could be tweaked for any provider in theory: https://www.paced.email/articles/how-to-auto-forward-specific-emails-in-gmail-to-paced-email https://www.paced.email/articles/how-to-auto-forward-specifi...
  - yosito 5y ago
    But I don't want to trust, and pay for, multiple email providers. It increases cost, complexity, liability and lock-in. I'd prefer an email productivity tool that is a downloadable desktop/mobile app that I can start/stop using with no friction.
logronoide 5y ago
The launch of Hey was a masterclass about how to create the right hype around a product that nobody cares or needs. They are genius selling themselves. But that’s not enough because they aren’t able to find a product that people want in large amounts.
- long11l 5y ago
  Maybe I've been watching too much scam fighting on YouTube ala coffeezilla and a few other people. But the term "masterclass" alone on a product is a huge red flag immediately to me. Does anyone sell a product as a masterclass that is legitimate?
  - logronoide 5y ago
    Not sure if I understand you correctly, but yes I think that the marketing campaign should never ever eclipse the product in itself. That’s how I felt when they launched it. From a product marketer point of view it was great. But from the product manager perspective I felt disappointed.
  - coldtea 5y ago
    They don't sell anything as "masterclass" nor is the term used anywhere regarding their product. They sell an email service. What the parent meant was that the launch of their service was a "masterclass in marketing" -- ie. they promoted it very well.
- coldtea 5y ago
  >But that’s not enough because they aren’t able to find a product that people want in large amounts. Well, they built Basecamp and a few other products, which kept them going for close to 20 years with tons of paying customers (and even some Bezos investment), so there's that. Not to mention creating RoR...
  - logronoide 5y ago
    I have explained my “boutique” point of view in a different answer. Hey should be the product to leave the “boutique” tag and it is not working.
effisfor 5y ago
For mental health, I've found it a great relief from Gmail. If you feel your mental health is affected not only by noise, but also privacy violations, supporting monopolies etc. From a designers/UX perspective, there are some thoughtful touches. "The feed" is not just a bucket/folder, but the UI changes for all those newsletters, and I've found that calming. I actually read the curated list of newsletters I've signed up to now, once a week or so in a magazine-like stream without the dozen buttons required for a letter-like email. The 'reply later' feature allows me to put aside a few emails over a couple of days, then click the 'focus and reply' button and those emails come up in a clean list with a stripped-back interface which moves on to the next email in the stack. Despite the on-trend aesthetics, this is a thoughtful piece of design, which I moved to for the above reasons and is delivering on. The support has also been excellent. I submitted a feature request, they got back personally quickly, and then a couple of months followed a personable (possibly automated) email saying the feature I'd requested was now live. (Notion is also in the habit of attending to its users like this). All email clients are garbage-out if we keep putting garbage in, but as a person looking for a more calming space to manage the deluge, I would say the above review is limited in scope in understanding what Hey is designed for. Why build another email client if it doesn't make some opinionated moves contrary to the state of the art?
gherkinnn 5y ago
As somebody who doesn't use Email much, Hey is a blessing. I just do not care about folders or labels. All I want is a place to store order receipts and manage the two emails a week I write. Its a simple tool for my simple problem. An interesting conversation is to be had regarding the tech stack. I never used Basecamp, but Hey does indeed feel sluggish. And I'd wager most of these issues could be solved by adding, gasp, more JS to the page. Partial DOM changes, optimistic updates, keep a little state on the FE before sending a request to reduce the number of slow round trips, etc. Outlook 365, despite offering a million features I don't care about, is incredibly fast.
- strzibny 5y ago
  I think it's still better than GMail which is quick once it loads, but doesn't load for me many times when abroad. And for such a simple app (list last X emails), it's staggering they are not even trying to fix it.
samtrack2019 5y ago
I stopped my subscribtion, the company doesn't inspire confiance, i don't care what's going on with their morale wrt their employees but a lot of people does and their business model is falling
- coldtea 5y ago
  Sorry, but this sounds like total over-reaction... Their "business model is failing"? Says who?
stefano_c 5y ago
> There are no tags, or labels, no other folders or any other buckets of organization. Actually there are labels (and what's the difference between a tag and a label?) > [...] there’s no automatic organization here When you get an email from a new contact you decide where it (and future emails) should go; you can also change the destination after it has landed in your Imbox. > It is Slow & Ugly This is very subjective: I like the UI a lot, and I've never perceived any slowness (Gmail, on the other hand...)
agd 5y ago
I’ve used Hey for over 6 months and am enjoying it. It supports my needs: - No notifications by default - Helps me reduce inbox clutter (I try to minimise the amount of email I receive) - Privacy first by stripping out trackers (this alone makes it worth it for me) - Great ‘reply-later’ feature which I use all the time It’s not perfect but I’m happy.
- wilsonrocks 5y ago
  Same here, a happy customer.
- jacobrussell 5y ago
  Happy customer as well. I also like the peace of mind if I find myself in a situation where I need to provide an email to use a service and expect some spam later knowing that I can screen them out and never see them again. No trackers or anything.
ksec 5y ago
>It is Slow & Ugly >So much of Hey’s interface feels slow. Clicking through email threads, searching, opening up attachments, the Electron wrapper Web application, the clumsy mobile apps, all of them feel just slow, clunky and ugly. Which is why response time is crucial. There are plenty of users from say AUS, SG, Japan, or Europe that are 100ms+ RTT minimum and in some cases up to 200ms RTT. I would imagine with Email, there is a possibility of moving Server much closer to client. And Ruby Rails ( Active Record ) aren't exactly known for being good at serving resources with low latency. Hopefully there will be many more work and improvements to be extracted from Hey.
pimterry 5y ago
I'd really recommend https://missiveapp.com https://missiveapp.com as an alternative (not affiliated, just a happy customer). Lots of team features, but even for individuals it has things like thread merging, snooze, tracker blocking, alias support, email templates, etc etc. Huge boost for work email vs gmail. Also, it's available only as a UI on top of your existing mail server, so super easy to migrate on/off and plays nicely with other tools & clients.
- bachmeier 5y ago
  That's a very niche app. Niche in the sense of "how many people are going to pay $180 a year for an email client?"[0] $99 a year for Hey.com is steep for most of the population. I honestly can't imagine someone paying double that for something most people get for free. [0] It does a lot more than email, and for that reason may be worth $180 a year, but you present it as an alternative for email.
  - pimterry 5y ago
    If you do a lot of email, especially professionally, it's totally worth it, even just for email alone. I feel like a lot of people were using Hey to help them manage their email-heavy workflows (e.g. their focused replying tools to handle a big batch of emails in series) and that's the market here too. Fully agree it doesn't make sense if you're just sending & receiving a handful of emails a week (but in that case, why look past gmail at all). For comparison: Superhuman costs $360/year, Spike costs $144/year, Front costs $228/year, etc etc. Some people pay for serious email tools.
    - CallMeJim 5y ago
      We use Front – team situation handling a lot of email, well worth it. No doubt a lot of providers have exactly the same features, but unless we'd gain something drastically better from switching it's not worth the hassle. One under-appreciated feature: commenting on emails is incredibly powerful. Now when I use Gmail, I find myself wanting to comment "paid" on bills, or "waiting for Dianne to call back before I book the event". It's one of those simple things that make your life so much easier: when your inbox acts as a de-facto to-do list, having the status and next steps clearly visible makes everything stress free.
stephc_int13 5y ago
I also tried it when I was looking for a Gmail alternative, I used it during a few days but I was not impressed and chose to use a good old desktop email client instead. I think using webmail is a bad idea after all.
coldtea 5y ago
Refreshingly the main issues weren't about the controversy, as I feared, but actual points of product critique. Though for some mysterious reason the author also felt like they have to mention it...
knadh 5y ago
I've had a personal e-mail ID on a custom domain for a long time that I've connected to everything from self-hosted setups to several providers including GMail. The web UIs have never been an issue thanks to Thunderbird. Last year, I switched to ProtonMail (Thunderbird on Linux with their "bridge" client). Works flawlessly, spam classification works well alongside Thunderbird's junk classification, and the mobile app is pretty slick too. Anecdotal experience being, a local client like Thunderbird (mine still has e-mails from 18+ years ago) + whatever provider via IMAP/POP has been a rock solid setup that has withstood time. It might not be wise to trust any cloud e-mail provider in the long run.
- blacktriangle 5y ago
  I've been looking at moving to self-hosted personal email. I'm curious did you have any deliverability issues with your setup? That's my biggest area of concern.
  - dqv 5y ago
    You shouldn't have any deliverability issues unless you're sending bulk mail. You may have to bother some mail admins if they have bad IP blocklist rules. Most mail providers are fast to respond if you're having delivery issues to them. Except for Zoho. Encourage people with Zoho to switch mail providers.
    - Spivak 5y ago
      Or if you’re not the type to email randos on the internet it’s not that hard to piggyback off of ses, sendgrid, postmark, etc.. Might defeat the point of self-hosting for you but at that point at least you own your data.
  - knadh 5y ago
    It’s possible to achieve good deliverability with some effort. Proper SMTP config and a “clean” dedicated IP from a host with no history of spamming. I gave up on the Postfix/Dovecot setup when I switched hosts and figured I’d just rely on a dedicated provider. At the end of the day, with a local client, the email provider is merely a pluggable relay.
kochie 5y ago
Out of all the services I pay for the $50 a year I pay for Fastmail has to be the best value for money I get. Fastmail really is a no nonsense email provider that just works and the R&D work they're doing is going to be worthwhile in the near future.
- miralize 5y ago
  Switched to Fastmail in October of last year in an attempt to de-googlify myself. It truly is no-nonsense but the speed of the UI blew me away. Opening an email was snappy, no obnoxious loading spinners; it was a huge breath of fresh air. Its almost like I didn't realise that web email clients could be fast & that Gmail was "good enough".
  - emptyparadise 5y ago
    Gmail's basic HTML view is a blessing.
  - michaelbuckbee 5y ago
    You mentioned the fast UI, but I've found the actual sending+delivery to be very quick as well. I use Fastmail for a variety of alerts and support communications and it's just outstanding.
  - nuker 5y ago
    > Switched to Fastmail in October of last year in an attempt to de-googlify myself. What about @icloud.com? I moved to Apple from GMail.
    - Redoubts 5y ago
      That literally de-googles, but I could see someone not being inclined to move from one tech giant to another. Also their server side mail filters aren't very good.
    - 1_player 5y ago
      I cannot overstate how a _really_ bad idea it is to register your most important asset, your email, on someone else's domain. I wish we techies would teach this to non computer literates, yet I see plenty software engineers doing this very rookie and dangerous mistake. Get your own domain ASAP.
shafyy 5y ago
I'm happy with Hey, and we also started using Hey for Work at our small (2 people) company. What I like about Hey: - Screener feature that let's you just quickly hide senders (or whole sender domains) quickly - The three basic categories, Imbox, Feed and Papertrail work great for me. I never used folders or labels in Fastmail or Gmail, but I use this categorization - The Recycling feature that automatically deletes old emails is a nice touch On top of that Hey for Work offers great collab features like sharing an email thread with a coworker without needing to do the BCC dance (they get instant access to the whole thread), thread merging and thread collections are also useful features (not exclusive to Hey for Work, but I found them most useful in a work context). Their customer support is also super fast and helpful. Some comments here mention that it feel slow and sluggish. For me it's as fast as Fastmail, faster than the bloated Gmail for sure. I was using Fastmail before and also liked it - but what sets Hey apart from Fastmail is that they are trying new things to improve the whole email experience. I understand that it might not work for some people, but it sure works for me.
- beshrkayali 5y ago
  I'm thankful that Fastmail is not trying new things with their interface that messes up my flow. I've been using it for years and consistency is the main reason I love it. I'm tired of meaningless and random changes to UIs just for the sake of change. FWIW I think "solving" email is almost impossible because there's nothing to solve, it works as intended.
timdaub 5y ago
Hey! Where is encrypted email?
avipars 5y ago
I never used them... would rather pay for protonmail or use my own mailserver
- qshaman 5y ago
  I have, and went back to Protonmail, pretty much for all the reasons the author show. You didn't miss anything good to be honest. Those people at Basecamp do know how to hype things, and they use HDD twitter cult as leverage to get lots of customers, but at the end , keeping customers is where they struggle. I can see the "but they have a lot of basecamp paying customers" coming, lol, yeah, sure.
benjaminjosephw 5y ago
> It’s Easy to Switch Why would you list this along with the negative points? It implies that vendor lock-in is a reason not to switch providers. Surely this should be the expected norm and not something to call-out as a reason for leaving a service - doing so encourages product builders to avoid such an important facility.
benhurmarcel 5y ago
> There are no tags, or labels, no other folders or any other buckets of organization. There are labels: https://imgur.com/a/BPPrvoG https://imgur.com/a/BPPrvoG
sanketsaurav 5y ago
This is a great product critique. I went through a similar thing with HEY — subscribed in curiosity (and awe of Jason's product demo skills, also the Twitter hype in part). I cancelled my subscription after 2 months because of similar reasons mentioned in this post and went back to Gmail.
diragon 5y ago
Basecamp is the kind of company whose products I would happily pay for, but $50/year is too much for this service for me. In .fi there's a non-profit that's been running from 2006. For 40e/year they give me 550GB space, email (SMTP / IMAP), shell and a good Matrix homeserver.
- newscracker 5y ago
  Which service are you referring to in the latter part of your comment? Please provide a link.
  - noyesno 5y ago
    I'm guessing he is talking about kapsi.fi
- deepdmistry 5y ago
  I thought hey was 99$/year
Quarrelsome 5y ago
Sorry, is this an advert for fastmail? Cause it kinda looks like it.
- webmobdev 5y ago
  It is both a good critique of Hey services, and a shoutout to the alternative - Fastmail.com - preferred by the author. (For those looking for privacy focused alternative to Gmail / Outlook / iCloud checkout Vivaldi Mail - https://webmail.vivaldi.net/ https://webmail.vivaldi.net/ ... it was founded and is run by the former owner of Opera.)
acjohnson55 5y ago
I've canceled my subscription largely because I don't have faith they're going to be able to improve the product at the pace I'm interested in. I bought Hey more for its potential and stated intentions than its current reality. But with nearly half of the company leaving, due to what I consider poor executive leadership, I'm expecting the product to be in maintenance mode for the foreseeable future.
- strzibny 5y ago
  Did you read the recent update? I think they will bounce back quicker than you think. https://world.hey.com/dhh/after-the-storm-9370f871 https://world.hey.com/dhh/after-the-storm-9370f871
  - naravara 5y ago
    Surprised about the "hiring new colleagues" part already. I've been subscribed to their job listings since the news story broke and they haven't actually listed anything new. They must have had a good pipeline of candidates already queued up before the exodus. I suppose that's a smart move when you extend a "6 months severance and assistance with placement elsewhere" offer for disgruntled staff to voluntarily separate.
    - misiti3780 5y ago
      Not everyone wants deal with / talk about politics at work. I would not be surprised if they had a huge number of applications after this incident.
  - acjohnson55 5y ago
    They would say so, though, wouldn't they? Part of me reacted to that statement pretty negatively, in that it shows no real contrition or growth. But I do get that at the end of the day, as a business, they need to present themselves to customers as a going concern. Still, I think it's impossible to lose 40+% of your company without losing significant momentum. Also, I just don't want to patronize them with my business right now. I bought Hey out of goodwill and excitement, not what it was and is currently capable of.
paxys 5y ago
I tried Hey for a little bit, and feel that it replicated a lot of the mistakes which eventually failed Google's Inbox app. Everyone is looking for less process and overhead out of their email inbox. I don't want to spend time triaging and categorizing messages. I don't care about news feeds in my mailbox. I don't want another file share or reminders app. Give me an ordered mailbox with a good spam filter, and that's it.
Wowfunhappy 5y ago
> Proprietary Clients: You cannot use your own email client to access Hey. The stated justification for this is just lazy imo. Even Gmail which launched with a then unique labels and smart organization still allows IMAP support. The Screener could very well have been a mapped IMAP folder, and you could just move to Inbox to accept new emails in. When you build on top of an open protocol and then refuse interoperability, it reeks of an old Microsoft playbook. I’d actually flip this around—I don’t see any reason Hey couldn't and shouldn't just be an email client, which could work with any existing service. Unless it's a strategy to lock in users. No deal for me, thanks.
- joshka 5y ago
  > I’d actually flip this around—I don’t see any reason Hey couldn't and shouldn't just be an email client, which works with any existing service. This is the main thing that keeps me from even trying it. But also the lack of import of many years of existing mail.
  - mattl 5y ago
    I imported all of my previous year's email into HEY by opening my Gmail mailbox in mutt, selecting all the messages in INBOX (for example) and using mutt's bounce feature to bounce them over to HEY.com. Yes, the screener went nuts for a moment when I had thousands of emails to evaluate but it brought over some of the mail I get regularly and has been a game changer for me in terms of email productivity.
- qshaman 5y ago
  Because they wont be able to plug in RoR or rant on how you should "embrace the monolithic" and use Hey as a success story, and their fans will be very unhappy ;) Because with those people, is their way or the highway.
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
decent breakdown of what this guy didn't like but also comes across like he went in not really understanding some of the feature offering. He doesn't want Screener work, ok. Maybe it wasn't supposed to be taking care of all your bad incoming email automatically. The thing about third party apps is weak. Like, seriously, it's all in on Web for Basecamp and many of us everywhere, so you probably should have understood that? The whole Hey product is about the interface and the change in mentality about how to use/interact with email. Letting you go use mail in some old interface defeats the purpose. (not against open protocols, IMAP, interoperability, but I get this idea and like so many of us live in Gmail etc now anyways. It's not 2004 when gmail launched and no one knew how big it was gonna be so they left POP open)
nscalf 5y ago
I mostly disagree with this breakdown. The product is great if you're not making email your full-time job. I love the screening process, I find I get less spam in my inbox than I did with gmail and miss less emails that I care about. The minimalist design with only a couple of things I care about is a net positive versus other services interface that is flooded with features I don't really care about. Really the only major gripe I've had with Hey is the lack of calendar integration. I don't give out my hey email because it is a pain to handle calendar invites, I give out my gmail and forward the emails to hey. All of that being said, I get why power users aren't happy with hey. But I'm not sure it was made for power users, I think it was made for people who hate email and want as little of it in their life as possible.
- kitrose 5y ago
  I am also a happy customer for these exact same reasons. Screening and bundling are extremely helpful features when your mindset is wanting as little attention to email as you can, but still want to surface the important items.
ppetty 5y ago
I agree with several points in the post. I’m currently & primarily using Fastmail but wanted to give Hey a shot. For me, I’ve added some changes to Fastmail that are analogs of Hey features. For example, any incoming mail that isn’t from an address in my Contacts is filed in a folder called Screener. I also set up folders called Feed & Paper Trail … and for each of those I have added Contacts to groups also called Feed & Paper Trail; where new emails from Contacts in those Groups go directly to those folders. Pretty straight forward,and in my email client & on Fastmail.com I can easily see unread emails in each folder. (You can’t see all folders in Hey.) I also have done the same for emails related to kids school related emails. I can’t arbitrarily add folders that belong in a bucket like that with Hey (yet). That inflexibility is a trademark of Basecamp & all the associated tools and functionality; and will probably be ok for many. The author does inaccurately claim Hey doesn’t have Labels & that you can’t automatically label things. Maybe that’s what I’m supposed to do with the ~ 10 school emails I get per day. But for the next few months I’m going to keep up with the new features & toward the end of my year long commitment give it one more go. So far, though; the things I really like I have been able to replicate for the most part. Even hey@world.com functionality can be achieved with email publishing on most open source blogs. I think Hey is great, but in a way it reminds me of the Dropbox Apple acquisition story where Jobs said Dropbox was a feature. Hey seems like a lot of features. Gmail was a game changer, I’m not sure Hey is.
abinaya_rl 5y ago
If your mental health is important, then I would suggest Hey is a great relief from Gmail and other services. It just prevents random people from emailing you and the Screener allows you to filter them and nudge them.
terminalserver 5y ago
Basecamp will be sold within a year.

202 points by tachyons 5y ago

eastern 5y ago

I too paid for one year of Hey and it delivered a genuine surprise for me: a renewed appreciation of Gmail ;-)

arcturus17 5y ago
Oh shit… I use Gmail (personally and professionally) and these are some strong words - I don’t hate it but I certainly don’t like and cannot fathom what would make me suddenly appreciate it.
- PascLeRasc 5y ago
  Simplify Gmail is pretty great, so is Mimestream. https://simpl.fyi/ https://simpl.fyi/ https://mimestream.com/ https://mimestream.com/

franz899 5y ago

I didn't renew mine either. My two main reasons are the mess they caused a few weeks ago and how bad the search is. HEY has a great feature that lets you merge multiple threads under one name, but they do not have a higher weight over any other email subject or body. I've found myself lost in a long list of non-relevant emails when searching for a merge thread name, having to scroll email after email; how can they not give a higher weight to a custom string that I chose? All of this on a less than one-year-old archive, I don't know how this system can work overtime.

virgilp 5y ago
Genuinely curious, why is "the mess they caused" a primary reason to leave the service? It feels like "even if the service was wonderful you'd still consider leaving because of <the mess>". What exactly makes you feel like that? (to clarify, it's not entirely clear to me what did DHH do wrong [+], let alone "so wrong that one would want to avoid Basecamp like the plague"). [+] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27003221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27003221
- nindalf 5y ago
  We’ve been taught as consumers to vote with our wallets. I want to “vote” for the service that gives me the most satisfaction. And my satisfaction is impacted by financing people whom I dislike. Best part about this is that you can tell me I’m wrong and that I should only consider features and UX and what not but I don’t need to listen. I’ll vote the way that satisfies me. It’s a similar dynamic with voting for politicians. You might find a politician who promises to fulfil all your policy desires … while being an abhorrent person. Some might “hold their nose” and vote for this politician anyway, others might not. Neither is wrong. They’re both maximising their own satisfaction.
- Lazare 5y ago
  Not the person you asked, but in my view: 1. There's a lot of products and teams out there, and your purchasing decisions help ensure some products and teams stick around and have more resources to keep doing what they're doing, and that other's don't. Imagine you want to buy a custom gizmo, and three vendors all seem equally good, but you notice one of them is also a contributor to an open source package you love. Why wouldn't you buy the gizmo from that guy? But the flip side of that is, if a vendor seems to be a jerk, and there's other equally good options... 2. Even beyond that, investing in a product, tool, platform, workflow, whatever has costs. If there's any signs that the people behind it are about to get acqui-hired and shut the product down, or are idiots who are running the product into the ground, or are terrible at security and are likely going to have a major breach...again, why wouldn't you jump ship? And here, we have a small company who just ran face first into a brick wall, picked themselves up, and then did it three more times, parleying a PR disaster into a bigger PR disaster, 1/3 of the company including tons of senior staff jumping ship, and then a another PR disaster as they got tarred in the court of public opinion as soft on white supremacists. They say that there's no such thing as bad PR, but I'd rather not watch a company who makes a tool I rely on test that theory. And certainly my estimate of Hey being around - or getting the resources it needs to keep improving - is a bit lower now than it was six months ago. 3. Also, the HR failures you are discussing in your linked comment are, I think, extremely clear. Is it actually wrong for the CEO to dig through archives to play gotcha games with staff members in order to publicly humiliate them in front of the whole company? ...yes. Yes it was. What was he supposed to do? ANYTHING BUT THAT. I don't think this is really a complicated question.

jakeva 5y ago

In recommending Fastmail > Less opinionated of course, but you get more work done. It seems like a harsh take to me. Putting aside the philosophy of work as a virtue, I have also had Fastmail for many years and it's not much different than Gmail or Yahoo or any other service I've had. What I like about Hey.com is that I feel supported in my decision to just fucking block things I didn't ask for, or don't remember asking for, or just don't want anymore. It invites me to block them. but that's just me

Wiegand36 5y ago

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bnt 5y ago

(Maybe) not in particular related to Hey.com, but I'm worried about the amount of people (apparently 50%) who left Basecamp, and how that will reflect on the future development of their services (Basecamp, Hey) but also on Ruby on Rails and the surrounding ecosystem (like Stimulus, Turbo etc). I'm one of those (rare?) folks who still think Rails is a fantastic framework and it suits most of my private projects just fine (I haven't felt the need for a SPA approach in my last 2 years) - but I'm now hesitant to start anything new on Rails because I don't know who will pick up maintenance of Stimulus, Turbo and multiple Rails gems.

rikkipitt 5y ago
DHH tweeted this today: https://world.hey.com/dhh/after-the-storm-9370f871 https://world.hey.com/dhh/after-the-storm-9370f871 Sounds like they've hired new staff so hopefully there wont be too much disruption in the maintenance of these packages.
jw1224 5y ago
> I'm worried about the amount of people (apparently 50%) who left Basecamp Are you saying Basecamp lost half its users? Source?
- detaro 5y ago
  they are talking about employees, not users. (no clue of the number is correct, I think I saw ~40% mentioned)

rikkipitt 5y ago

I'm thankful for Hey and the underlying work that is seeping back into Rails – specifically Action Mailbox. It has enabled me to create a product* that goes someway to helping with email burnout. In a nutshell: Programmable email addresses that you can make on the fly (or in advance). Each with an intrinsic timer/buffer that sends a single email containing all the messages received in that period. I.e. get one notification per day/week/month for a certain email or topic instead of a constant distracting stream of noise. * https://www.paced.email https://www.paced.email

jes 5y ago
Your service looks interesting. Can I trust that you’re not reading my email and selling or otherwise trading on information gleaned from it? I read your privacy policy. I didn’t see anything that explicitly ruled out my concern.
- rikkipitt 5y ago
  Great question! I actually address this concern here: https://www.paced.email/docs/security https://www.paced.email/docs/security I’m going to surface this page a bit better soon as I’m currently developing a multi-tenancy feature along with branding improvements. Rikki
  - jes 5y ago
    No one. Your personal information and email routed through Paced Email via Mailgun are not sold, read, or shared with third-parties. I'm not in the business of selling your data. I appreciated the clarity of this. Thank you.
jarek83 5y ago
Out of curiosity, just trying to evaluate your service - how this is better from properly labelling emails in gmail?

yosito 5y ago

I'd love to see an email productivity tool that doesn't require me to switch email addresses and email providers. Sometimes a productivity paradigm works, sometimes it doesn't. The provider I choose depends more on things like security, privacy, reliability and cost. My email addresses are a catch all tied to my domain, and ideally never change. I don't want to have to switch providers and email addresses just to test if a different productivity paradigm works for me.

rikkipitt 5y ago
Some clever customers of my email productivity tool (mentioned above) had a similar sentiment. They figured out a way to forward their emails to my service thereby keeping both separate and still benefitting from my tool. It prompted me to write up a how-to for Gmail which could be tweaked for any provider in theory: https://www.paced.email/articles/how-to-auto-forward-specific-emails-in-gmail-to-paced-email https://www.paced.email/articles/how-to-auto-forward-specifi...
- yosito 5y ago
  But I don't want to trust, and pay for, multiple email providers. It increases cost, complexity, liability and lock-in. I'd prefer an email productivity tool that is a downloadable desktop/mobile app that I can start/stop using with no friction.

logronoide 5y ago

The launch of Hey was a masterclass about how to create the right hype around a product that nobody cares or needs. They are genius selling themselves. But that’s not enough because they aren’t able to find a product that people want in large amounts.

long11l 5y ago
Maybe I've been watching too much scam fighting on YouTube ala coffeezilla and a few other people. But the term "masterclass" alone on a product is a huge red flag immediately to me. Does anyone sell a product as a masterclass that is legitimate?
- logronoide 5y ago
  Not sure if I understand you correctly, but yes I think that the marketing campaign should never ever eclipse the product in itself. That’s how I felt when they launched it. From a product marketer point of view it was great. But from the product manager perspective I felt disappointed.
- coldtea 5y ago
  They don't sell anything as "masterclass" nor is the term used anywhere regarding their product. They sell an email service. What the parent meant was that the launch of their service was a "masterclass in marketing" -- ie. they promoted it very well.
coldtea 5y ago
>But that’s not enough because they aren’t able to find a product that people want in large amounts. Well, they built Basecamp and a few other products, which kept them going for close to 20 years with tons of paying customers (and even some Bezos investment), so there's that. Not to mention creating RoR...
- logronoide 5y ago
  I have explained my “boutique” point of view in a different answer. Hey should be the product to leave the “boutique” tag and it is not working.

effisfor 5y ago

For mental health, I've found it a great relief from Gmail. If you feel your mental health is affected not only by noise, but also privacy violations, supporting monopolies etc. From a designers/UX perspective, there are some thoughtful touches. "The feed" is not just a bucket/folder, but the UI changes for all those newsletters, and I've found that calming. I actually read the curated list of newsletters I've signed up to now, once a week or so in a magazine-like stream without the dozen buttons required for a letter-like email. The 'reply later' feature allows me to put aside a few emails over a couple of days, then click the 'focus and reply' button and those emails come up in a clean list with a stripped-back interface which moves on to the next email in the stack. Despite the on-trend aesthetics, this is a thoughtful piece of design, which I moved to for the above reasons and is delivering on. The support has also been excellent. I submitted a feature request, they got back personally quickly, and then a couple of months followed a personable (possibly automated) email saying the feature I'd requested was now live. (Notion is also in the habit of attending to its users like this). All email clients are garbage-out if we keep putting garbage in, but as a person looking for a more calming space to manage the deluge, I would say the above review is limited in scope in understanding what Hey is designed for. Why build another email client if it doesn't make some opinionated moves contrary to the state of the art?

gherkinnn 5y ago

As somebody who doesn't use Email much, Hey is a blessing. I just do not care about folders or labels. All I want is a place to store order receipts and manage the two emails a week I write. Its a simple tool for my simple problem. An interesting conversation is to be had regarding the tech stack. I never used Basecamp, but Hey does indeed feel sluggish. And I'd wager most of these issues could be solved by adding, gasp, more JS to the page. Partial DOM changes, optimistic updates, keep a little state on the FE before sending a request to reduce the number of slow round trips, etc. Outlook 365, despite offering a million features I don't care about, is incredibly fast.

strzibny 5y ago
I think it's still better than GMail which is quick once it loads, but doesn't load for me many times when abroad. And for such a simple app (list last X emails), it's staggering they are not even trying to fix it.

samtrack2019 5y ago

I stopped my subscribtion, the company doesn't inspire confiance, i don't care what's going on with their morale wrt their employees but a lot of people does and their business model is falling

coldtea 5y ago
Sorry, but this sounds like total over-reaction... Their "business model is failing"? Says who?

stefano_c 5y ago

> There are no tags, or labels, no other folders or any other buckets of organization. Actually there are labels (and what's the difference between a tag and a label?) > [...] there’s no automatic organization here When you get an email from a new contact you decide where it (and future emails) should go; you can also change the destination after it has landed in your Imbox. > It is Slow & Ugly This is very subjective: I like the UI a lot, and I've never perceived any slowness (Gmail, on the other hand...)

agd 5y ago

I’ve used Hey for over 6 months and am enjoying it. It supports my needs: - No notifications by default - Helps me reduce inbox clutter (I try to minimise the amount of email I receive) - Privacy first by stripping out trackers (this alone makes it worth it for me) - Great ‘reply-later’ feature which I use all the time It’s not perfect but I’m happy.

wilsonrocks 5y ago
Same here, a happy customer.
jacobrussell 5y ago
Happy customer as well. I also like the peace of mind if I find myself in a situation where I need to provide an email to use a service and expect some spam later knowing that I can screen them out and never see them again. No trackers or anything.

ksec 5y ago

>It is Slow & Ugly >So much of Hey’s interface feels slow. Clicking through email threads, searching, opening up attachments, the Electron wrapper Web application, the clumsy mobile apps, all of them feel just slow, clunky and ugly. Which is why response time is crucial. There are plenty of users from say AUS, SG, Japan, or Europe that are 100ms+ RTT minimum and in some cases up to 200ms RTT. I would imagine with Email, there is a possibility of moving Server much closer to client. And Ruby Rails ( Active Record ) aren't exactly known for being good at serving resources with low latency. Hopefully there will be many more work and improvements to be extracted from Hey.

pimterry 5y ago

I'd really recommend https://missiveapp.com https://missiveapp.com as an alternative (not affiliated, just a happy customer). Lots of team features, but even for individuals it has things like thread merging, snooze, tracker blocking, alias support, email templates, etc etc. Huge boost for work email vs gmail. Also, it's available only as a UI on top of your existing mail server, so super easy to migrate on/off and plays nicely with other tools & clients.

bachmeier 5y ago
That's a very niche app. Niche in the sense of "how many people are going to pay $180 a year for an email client?"[0] $99 a year for Hey.com is steep for most of the population. I honestly can't imagine someone paying double that for something most people get for free. [0] It does a lot more than email, and for that reason may be worth $180 a year, but you present it as an alternative for email.
- pimterry 5y ago
  If you do a lot of email, especially professionally, it's totally worth it, even just for email alone. I feel like a lot of people were using Hey to help them manage their email-heavy workflows (e.g. their focused replying tools to handle a big batch of emails in series) and that's the market here too. Fully agree it doesn't make sense if you're just sending & receiving a handful of emails a week (but in that case, why look past gmail at all). For comparison: Superhuman costs $360/year, Spike costs $144/year, Front costs $228/year, etc etc. Some people pay for serious email tools.
  - CallMeJim 5y ago
    We use Front – team situation handling a lot of email, well worth it. No doubt a lot of providers have exactly the same features, but unless we'd gain something drastically better from switching it's not worth the hassle. One under-appreciated feature: commenting on emails is incredibly powerful. Now when I use Gmail, I find myself wanting to comment "paid" on bills, or "waiting for Dianne to call back before I book the event". It's one of those simple things that make your life so much easier: when your inbox acts as a de-facto to-do list, having the status and next steps clearly visible makes everything stress free.

stephc_int13 5y ago

I also tried it when I was looking for a Gmail alternative, I used it during a few days but I was not impressed and chose to use a good old desktop email client instead. I think using webmail is a bad idea after all.

coldtea 5y ago

Refreshingly the main issues weren't about the controversy, as I feared, but actual points of product critique. Though for some mysterious reason the author also felt like they have to mention it...

knadh 5y ago

I've had a personal e-mail ID on a custom domain for a long time that I've connected to everything from self-hosted setups to several providers including GMail. The web UIs have never been an issue thanks to Thunderbird. Last year, I switched to ProtonMail (Thunderbird on Linux with their "bridge" client). Works flawlessly, spam classification works well alongside Thunderbird's junk classification, and the mobile app is pretty slick too. Anecdotal experience being, a local client like Thunderbird (mine still has e-mails from 18+ years ago) + whatever provider via IMAP/POP has been a rock solid setup that has withstood time. It might not be wise to trust any cloud e-mail provider in the long run.

blacktriangle 5y ago
I've been looking at moving to self-hosted personal email. I'm curious did you have any deliverability issues with your setup? That's my biggest area of concern.
- dqv 5y ago
  You shouldn't have any deliverability issues unless you're sending bulk mail. You may have to bother some mail admins if they have bad IP blocklist rules. Most mail providers are fast to respond if you're having delivery issues to them. Except for Zoho. Encourage people with Zoho to switch mail providers.
  - Spivak 5y ago
    Or if you’re not the type to email randos on the internet it’s not that hard to piggyback off of ses, sendgrid, postmark, etc.. Might defeat the point of self-hosting for you but at that point at least you own your data.
- knadh 5y ago
  It’s possible to achieve good deliverability with some effort. Proper SMTP config and a “clean” dedicated IP from a host with no history of spamming. I gave up on the Postfix/Dovecot setup when I switched hosts and figured I’d just rely on a dedicated provider. At the end of the day, with a local client, the email provider is merely a pluggable relay.

kochie 5y ago

Out of all the services I pay for the $50 a year I pay for Fastmail has to be the best value for money I get. Fastmail really is a no nonsense email provider that just works and the R&D work they're doing is going to be worthwhile in the near future.

miralize 5y ago
Switched to Fastmail in October of last year in an attempt to de-googlify myself. It truly is no-nonsense but the speed of the UI blew me away. Opening an email was snappy, no obnoxious loading spinners; it was a huge breath of fresh air. Its almost like I didn't realise that web email clients could be fast & that Gmail was "good enough".
- emptyparadise 5y ago
  Gmail's basic HTML view is a blessing.
- michaelbuckbee 5y ago
  You mentioned the fast UI, but I've found the actual sending+delivery to be very quick as well. I use Fastmail for a variety of alerts and support communications and it's just outstanding.
- nuker 5y ago
  > Switched to Fastmail in October of last year in an attempt to de-googlify myself. What about @icloud.com? I moved to Apple from GMail.
  - Redoubts 5y ago
    That literally de-googles, but I could see someone not being inclined to move from one tech giant to another. Also their server side mail filters aren't very good.
  - 1_player 5y ago
    I cannot overstate how a _really_ bad idea it is to register your most important asset, your email, on someone else's domain. I wish we techies would teach this to non computer literates, yet I see plenty software engineers doing this very rookie and dangerous mistake. Get your own domain ASAP.

shafyy 5y ago

I'm happy with Hey, and we also started using Hey for Work at our small (2 people) company. What I like about Hey: - Screener feature that let's you just quickly hide senders (or whole sender domains) quickly - The three basic categories, Imbox, Feed and Papertrail work great for me. I never used folders or labels in Fastmail or Gmail, but I use this categorization - The Recycling feature that automatically deletes old emails is a nice touch On top of that Hey for Work offers great collab features like sharing an email thread with a coworker without needing to do the BCC dance (they get instant access to the whole thread), thread merging and thread collections are also useful features (not exclusive to Hey for Work, but I found them most useful in a work context). Their customer support is also super fast and helpful. Some comments here mention that it feel slow and sluggish. For me it's as fast as Fastmail, faster than the bloated Gmail for sure. I was using Fastmail before and also liked it - but what sets Hey apart from Fastmail is that they are trying new things to improve the whole email experience. I understand that it might not work for some people, but it sure works for me.

beshrkayali 5y ago
I'm thankful that Fastmail is not trying new things with their interface that messes up my flow. I've been using it for years and consistency is the main reason I love it. I'm tired of meaningless and random changes to UIs just for the sake of change. FWIW I think "solving" email is almost impossible because there's nothing to solve, it works as intended.

timdaub 5y ago

Hey! Where is encrypted email?

avipars 5y ago

I never used them... would rather pay for protonmail or use my own mailserver

qshaman 5y ago
I have, and went back to Protonmail, pretty much for all the reasons the author show. You didn't miss anything good to be honest. Those people at Basecamp do know how to hype things, and they use HDD twitter cult as leverage to get lots of customers, but at the end , keeping customers is where they struggle. I can see the "but they have a lot of basecamp paying customers" coming, lol, yeah, sure.

benjaminjosephw 5y ago

> It’s Easy to Switch Why would you list this along with the negative points? It implies that vendor lock-in is a reason not to switch providers. Surely this should be the expected norm and not something to call-out as a reason for leaving a service - doing so encourages product builders to avoid such an important facility.

benhurmarcel 5y ago

> There are no tags, or labels, no other folders or any other buckets of organization. There are labels: https://imgur.com/a/BPPrvoG https://imgur.com/a/BPPrvoG

sanketsaurav 5y ago

This is a great product critique. I went through a similar thing with HEY — subscribed in curiosity (and awe of Jason's product demo skills, also the Twitter hype in part). I cancelled my subscription after 2 months because of similar reasons mentioned in this post and went back to Gmail.

diragon 5y ago

Basecamp is the kind of company whose products I would happily pay for, but $50/year is too much for this service for me. In .fi there's a non-profit that's been running from 2006. For 40e/year they give me 550GB space, email (SMTP / IMAP), shell and a good Matrix homeserver.

newscracker 5y ago
Which service are you referring to in the latter part of your comment? Please provide a link.
- noyesno 5y ago
  I'm guessing he is talking about kapsi.fi
deepdmistry 5y ago
I thought hey was 99$/year

Quarrelsome 5y ago

Sorry, is this an advert for fastmail? Cause it kinda looks like it.

webmobdev 5y ago
It is both a good critique of Hey services, and a shoutout to the alternative - Fastmail.com - preferred by the author. (For those looking for privacy focused alternative to Gmail / Outlook / iCloud checkout Vivaldi Mail - https://webmail.vivaldi.net/ https://webmail.vivaldi.net/ ... it was founded and is run by the former owner of Opera.)

acjohnson55 5y ago

I've canceled my subscription largely because I don't have faith they're going to be able to improve the product at the pace I'm interested in. I bought Hey more for its potential and stated intentions than its current reality. But with nearly half of the company leaving, due to what I consider poor executive leadership, I'm expecting the product to be in maintenance mode for the foreseeable future.

strzibny 5y ago
Did you read the recent update? I think they will bounce back quicker than you think. https://world.hey.com/dhh/after-the-storm-9370f871 https://world.hey.com/dhh/after-the-storm-9370f871
- naravara 5y ago
  Surprised about the "hiring new colleagues" part already. I've been subscribed to their job listings since the news story broke and they haven't actually listed anything new. They must have had a good pipeline of candidates already queued up before the exodus. I suppose that's a smart move when you extend a "6 months severance and assistance with placement elsewhere" offer for disgruntled staff to voluntarily separate.
  - misiti3780 5y ago
    Not everyone wants deal with / talk about politics at work. I would not be surprised if they had a huge number of applications after this incident.
- acjohnson55 5y ago
  They would say so, though, wouldn't they? Part of me reacted to that statement pretty negatively, in that it shows no real contrition or growth. But I do get that at the end of the day, as a business, they need to present themselves to customers as a going concern. Still, I think it's impossible to lose 40+% of your company without losing significant momentum. Also, I just don't want to patronize them with my business right now. I bought Hey out of goodwill and excitement, not what it was and is currently capable of.

paxys 5y ago

I tried Hey for a little bit, and feel that it replicated a lot of the mistakes which eventually failed Google's Inbox app. Everyone is looking for less process and overhead out of their email inbox. I don't want to spend time triaging and categorizing messages. I don't care about news feeds in my mailbox. I don't want another file share or reminders app. Give me an ordered mailbox with a good spam filter, and that's it.

Wowfunhappy 5y ago

> Proprietary Clients: You cannot use your own email client to access Hey. The stated justification for this is just lazy imo. Even Gmail which launched with a then unique labels and smart organization still allows IMAP support. The Screener could very well have been a mapped IMAP folder, and you could just move to Inbox to accept new emails in. When you build on top of an open protocol and then refuse interoperability, it reeks of an old Microsoft playbook. I’d actually flip this around—I don’t see any reason Hey couldn't and shouldn't just be an email client, which could work with any existing service. Unless it's a strategy to lock in users. No deal for me, thanks.

joshka 5y ago
> I’d actually flip this around—I don’t see any reason Hey couldn't and shouldn't just be an email client, which works with any existing service. This is the main thing that keeps me from even trying it. But also the lack of import of many years of existing mail.
- mattl 5y ago
  I imported all of my previous year's email into HEY by opening my Gmail mailbox in mutt, selecting all the messages in INBOX (for example) and using mutt's bounce feature to bounce them over to HEY.com. Yes, the screener went nuts for a moment when I had thousands of emails to evaluate but it brought over some of the mail I get regularly and has been a game changer for me in terms of email productivity.
qshaman 5y ago
Because they wont be able to plug in RoR or rant on how you should "embrace the monolithic" and use Hey as a success story, and their fans will be very unhappy ;) Because with those people, is their way or the highway.

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

decent breakdown of what this guy didn't like but also comes across like he went in not really understanding some of the feature offering. He doesn't want Screener work, ok. Maybe it wasn't supposed to be taking care of all your bad incoming email automatically. The thing about third party apps is weak. Like, seriously, it's all in on Web for Basecamp and many of us everywhere, so you probably should have understood that? The whole Hey product is about the interface and the change in mentality about how to use/interact with email. Letting you go use mail in some old interface defeats the purpose. (not against open protocols, IMAP, interoperability, but I get this idea and like so many of us live in Gmail etc now anyways. It's not 2004 when gmail launched and no one knew how big it was gonna be so they left POP open)

nscalf 5y ago

I mostly disagree with this breakdown. The product is great if you're not making email your full-time job. I love the screening process, I find I get less spam in my inbox than I did with gmail and miss less emails that I care about. The minimalist design with only a couple of things I care about is a net positive versus other services interface that is flooded with features I don't really care about. Really the only major gripe I've had with Hey is the lack of calendar integration. I don't give out my hey email because it is a pain to handle calendar invites, I give out my gmail and forward the emails to hey. All of that being said, I get why power users aren't happy with hey. But I'm not sure it was made for power users, I think it was made for people who hate email and want as little of it in their life as possible.

kitrose 5y ago
I am also a happy customer for these exact same reasons. Screening and bundling are extremely helpful features when your mindset is wanting as little attention to email as you can, but still want to surface the important items.

ppetty 5y ago

I agree with several points in the post. I’m currently & primarily using Fastmail but wanted to give Hey a shot. For me, I’ve added some changes to Fastmail that are analogs of Hey features. For example, any incoming mail that isn’t from an address in my Contacts is filed in a folder called Screener. I also set up folders called Feed & Paper Trail … and for each of those I have added Contacts to groups also called Feed & Paper Trail; where new emails from Contacts in those Groups go directly to those folders. Pretty straight forward,and in my email client & on Fastmail.com I can easily see unread emails in each folder. (You can’t see all folders in Hey.) I also have done the same for emails related to kids school related emails. I can’t arbitrarily add folders that belong in a bucket like that with Hey (yet). That inflexibility is a trademark of Basecamp & all the associated tools and functionality; and will probably be ok for many. The author does inaccurately claim Hey doesn’t have Labels & that you can’t automatically label things. Maybe that’s what I’m supposed to do with the ~ 10 school emails I get per day. But for the next few months I’m going to keep up with the new features & toward the end of my year long commitment give it one more go. So far, though; the things I really like I have been able to replicate for the most part. Even hey@world.com functionality can be achieved with email publishing on most open source blogs. I think Hey is great, but in a way it reminds me of the Dropbox Apple acquisition story where Jobs said Dropbox was a feature. Hey seems like a lot of features. Gmail was a game changer, I’m not sure Hey is.

abinaya_rl 5y ago

If your mental health is important, then I would suggest Hey is a great relief from Gmail and other services. It just prevents random people from emailing you and the Screener allows you to filter them and nudge them.

terminalserver 5y ago

Basecamp will be sold within a year.