Saying Good Bye to Hey.com
vishnugopal.com
vishnugopal.com
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.
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.
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
I appreciated the clarity of this. Thank you.
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.
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".
What about @icloud.com? I moved to Apple from GMail.
Also their server side mail filters aren't very good.
Get your own domain ASAP.
It also makes the mobile application unusable offline.
Outlook for iOS is surprisingly good.
For a browser wrapper app though, they've done much better than any other I've seen. It's just slightly slow on notifications, to load, and isn't usable offline.
Some of us still have SquirrelMail installed for the odd occasion. :)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SquirrelMail
FreeBSD's Ports has 7.4 and 8.0:
* https://www.freshports.org/mail/squirrelmail/
There's always Roundcube.
[1]: https://jmap.io/
However, I wish they had a Family plan.
We are 5, 300 euros per years is a lot of money (we pay for other services).
So far we use Office 365 for 100 euros (you get the occasional 50 euros per year offer) that covers up to 6 people.
100 vs 300 euros is a big difference for us.
[1]: https://drewdevault.com/2020/06/19/Mail-service-provider-rec...
I never used it, but they promise a 10% discount
Edit: I found this response[1], which seems to boil down to: "we already were compelled by other laws, so nothing has fundamentally changed"
[0]: https://protonmail.com/blog/australia-anti-encryption-law/
[1]: https://fastmail.blog/privacy-security/advocating-for-privac...
In general, I find it a good idea to pay for all critical net services for more than a year out, and renew them before they get down to less than a year left.
That way if something goes wrong that causes me to neglect things for a while, things won't expire on me. I could lose my job, have my possessions wiped out in a disaster, become seriously ill or injured, all during a major economic downturn, and it is nice knowing that if I recover my domains will still be mine and my email will still work.
I don’t particularly like nor dislike Gmail.
It’s a given that Google is abusing me and my data even though I’m a paying customer, but I find the integrared approach to GSuite insanely convenient and that’s possibly the main reason keeping me locked in.
What in Fastmail could persuade me to move out?
In my experience so far, Fastmail has a ridiculously smooth and fast web-UI. The sidebar feature they have is instant and way faster than the equivalent version on Gmail/Outlook.
Plus, they follow open standards very well, so it works seamlessly with Thunderbird and iOS (for email, contacts AND calendar syncing). They even have a built-in Notes client which syncs with Notes app on iOS.
Also, they sync gmail/icloud/outlook etc. email/calendars/contacts [1] over seamlessly and extremely quickly. So, if you have multiple email accounts, configuring receiving/sorting/sending emails using the FM UI is a breeze.
It also has a very good collection of customisation options for rules, folders etc. which makes sorting your emails a very efficient and seamless process.
Finally, and probably most importantly, it has a beautiful dark mode, with dark email background. The contrast is just right.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention the insane speed+smoothness of the web client again. It is, quite frankly, ridiculous.
[1] - Outlook Contacts/Calendar syncing doesn't work directly since MSFT doesn't support the required APIs (this is the warning FM shows you when you try).
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.
This is the main thing that keeps me from even trying it.
But also the lack of import of many years of existing mail.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
Does anyone sell a product as a masterclass that is legitimate?
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.
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...
Their whole philosophy is that you don't need to scale or sell out for VC money, and everything they did (and didn't do), is consistent with that.
Hey is just another service, like Basecamp, for those that want to pay for it, to sustain a profitable business. Not some Gmail-level wanabee.
I also happen to agree with that philosophy, considering eyeballs/VC/exit-oriented companies that aim for world domination poison and detrimental to consumers, to society, and to software.
I'd also like to note that what you call "boutique" is what, for the most part of capitalism, and even in IT up to the late 90s, we used to call a regular business.
Suddenly running a business with 10M-100M of revenue and a hefty profit is somehow an insult, and it's "boutique" or "lifestyle"...
I don’t know why. But the purpose of the marketing campaign of Hey sent that message.
I’m a big fan of non VC backed or boutique like companies (I have built and sold some of them), and it’s dangerous to send the wrong message to the market. I think that is what happened with Hey.
Did it tho? I'm not so sure. It's a marketing campaign, they're supposed to hype a product.
But if they were really going for this, it wouldn't just be pushed to their regular customers and nerd public. They'd get big VC money involved, make it free, push it much harder with ads everywhere, etc.
They’re a very successful and profitable company for 20 years. How is that ‘not enough’?
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.
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?
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.
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.
[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.
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.
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.
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...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
On 3, no the HR failure is *honestly* completely unclear to me. Having read DHH's actual answer (and not people rephrasing it), do you still believe that "ANYTHING BUT THAT" was the answer? I can respect that, though to be honest I don't understand it, at all. I consider his answer quite good, and the alternative I jokingly presented (acknowledge the employee's message, and fire them on the spot) would be in my mind clearly worse; DHH was trying to be kind AND at the same time teach the person something (don't be such a harsh judge, people evolve and improve, sometimes mistakes of the past don't represent what you are now).
(+) Actually upon further reflection I completely understand point 2, "I don't trust that they'll be in business for long so don't want to tie a critical service to them", but I just didn't consider _that_ was the reason; if that was it, then this answers it for me.
But even taking it entirely at face value, I think he clearly describes a poorly handled situation. It wasn't the right time to be having that argument, he wasn't the right person to be doing it, it wasn't the right venue for it, and I don't think the way his argument was made or framed was at all helpful.
Because what seems to have happened is something like:
Employee: Hey, event X was super, super bad!
DHH: Well, it wasn't that bad. Medium bad, at most.
Employee: How can you be defending event X?
Was DHH right? ...maybe. Again, we're lacking a ton of context. But let's assume he's correct in every regard! By jumping in, now he's on the side of saying that event X was relatively good. He is, objectively, defending it. And to what end? He's the CTO; he can win the argument. What does he get for winning?
Why not, I dunno, nod, agree, and then implement some new policies around preventing event X, where the policies are based on the idea that event X is only medium bad, not super bad?
Much of what makes this so dumb is that it's all so needless. You suggest DHH was trying to teach the person something; maybe that should be taught in a 1:1 with their manager or HR? You suggest DHH's alternative was firing them on the spot, how about "starting a process that leads to the employee being let go three months from now"?
You - and DHH - seem to feel like this was some sort of crisis that required immediate, public action. I remain mystified why that seemed relevant. None of the goals that DHH has claimed to have, or that his defenders have imputed to him, seem to require (or to have been achieved) by the actions he took here.
TL;DR: A manager's goal (especially a C-level exec or a co-founder) shouldn't be to win arguments, it should be to achieve organisational goals. These actions did not achieve any obvious organisational goals, and I cannot believe a reasonable observer would have predicted they would achieve any goals. Therefore, I label it a failure. Thus, for ethical and practical reasons, I would tend to avoid a company that seems so poorly led.
> A manager's goal (especially a C-level exec or a co-founder) shouldn't be to win arguments, it should be to achieve organisational goals
Agree: this should be the C-level goal. But ("disagree") I also think that's _exactly_ what DHH was doing.
My reading of the kerfuffle is this: Basecamp somehow managed to established a toxic work culture, where employees were discussing internally contentious social issues and it got so bad that it was breaking the team apart and impacting business performance; something had to be done. So JF+DHH issued the directive "no internal activism". Seen through this lens, everything else makes sense (you can't tolerate internal activism if you already established it's hurting you badly, because that would negate your efforts to curb it; and you're willing to buy out the "activists" so that you get rid of them - yes losing employees is bad, but it's "chemotherapy bad": it hurts you but may help you survive. Painful, but required). Time will tell if my reading of the events was correct, I guess.
[side note]
> Although I wouldn't necessarily assume his account is entirely accurate or includes all relevant context either!
He claims it's a copy-paste (with some anonymization). To my knowledge, nobody called him out as a liar (and lots of people had reasons to).
I think the question becomes not 'is the conduct bad enough to stop using the service, despite how good it is?', but 'is the service so good that I should continue using it, despite the conduct?'
The other is just business: a third of the company left so far. Among those people are the individuals who built the trix editor, Action Mailbox, and Hey's k8s setup. I fully expect more bugs, and more time to resolve those bugs. Make no mistake, a third of a company leaving is not resizing or business as usual - this will have downstream effects on the product.
There are labels: https://imgur.com/a/BPPrvoG
I think using webmail is a bad idea after all.
> 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
Sounds like they've hired new staff so hopefully there wont be too much disruption in the maintenance of these packages.
Are you saying Basecamp lost half its users? Source?
(For those looking for privacy focused alternative to Gmail / Outlook / iCloud checkout Vivaldi Mail - https://webmail.vivaldi.net/ ... it was founded and is run by the former owner of Opera.)
Their "business model is failing"? Says who?