I ran a poll on Twitter that is still going, but I'm wondering what folks on DEV think of the new Hey email service. Is it worth it or are you fine with GMail and the rest of the old guard? I am still conflicted.
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Late to the party but I created a browser extension that adds Hey's email screener and one click filtering directly on Gmail - zenmailhq.com
While supporting Feed and PaperTrail, it also works with your existing labels and filters. Would love to hear what people think of it and ideas on making it better.
I'm about halfway through my trial period. I like it. The Screener, Feed and Paper Trail features make sense to me and promote good habits. It is a well thought out and lovingly crafted product that is highly opinionated, so it steers you in certain ways. If you don't like that way, then it won't be for you. Folks are underrating how hard it is to pull off something that is clean and simple, while still powerful.
There are a few UX bumps in the client that I hope to see the Basecamp team fix over time, including some additional keyboard navigation shortcuts and edge cases around keeping track of scroll position.
I don't care about being "trapped" in their client. Their whole ethos is to put a different twist on email, which is dependent on their client. I also don't care about a custom domain.
I'm a long time user of Gmail and Hey is much faster and more responsive in my experience. Hey also does a better job of surfacing files/attachments and has some neat features around managing threads.
Just my 2 cents, but I'm quite impressed
I decided to pay for Hey since I am trying more and more to pay for products I value (for both how they improve my life and how they align with my personal values) and support smaller businesses.
As mentioned many times, I really like what Hey (and Basecamp team) stands for.
I also love how Hey makes me quite enjoy opening my e-mail. That didn't happen in a long time.
There are many features I find amazing - Screener, merging and renaming of threads, Feed.
Saying that I am a bit unsure about some workflows and features - I miss some more granular filtering of mails - there are some mail addresses from which I get mainly unimportant stuff I would like to screen out (or put in Paper Trail), but sometimes I might get really important one.
I guess I will see in a few months if it's just a fun temporal change for me or something for life.
We love the whole idea / and the people - but we had a falling out with basecamp - and just don't really trust the interface yet. We're all about paying for it - and have been talking about something like this for years / especially since Google products are going downhill - but still - thinking about 99 bucks per email, possible bad UX, and no custom domains yet... yikes... can't get all behind it yet. But still hopeful... and glad they're paving the way.
I am a paid user and am very happy. I like that it's simple. I like that I don't get alerts for stuff I don't care about. It made me realize about 80% of the time I checked my email it's for advertisements or other junk.
I have always been sort of a fan of minimalist systems though. And have thought less is more most times. So maybe I'm the type of person "hey" was designed for.
Nothing can be the right answer for everything, but as long as it helps a few of us its a good product in my eye.
I think that Hey has good concepts but not enough to justify its price. The overall UX isn’t as smooth as I had hoped it to be. I miss Google Inbox and the way it could help my productivity, since it was decommissioned I haven’t found a good replacement.
Hey looks cool but in the end feels like it strayed too far off from the email we all use and love. I've always maintained that new products need to strike the right balance between familiarity and innovation to make the transition comfortable, and Hey doesn't fit that balance in my opinion. The inability to use my own domain (which I'm told will be available by end of year) is a massive downgrade for my usage and prevents me from even considering it right now.
Liked the product.
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But - don't want to pay for it.
I haven't tried hey, but I just miss Inbox. RIP Inbox. 😭
I just see a list of features that Gmail team need to consider.
Especially the "screener" feature.
The ZenMail extension (zenmailhq.com) adds the screener feature on top of Gmail!
Perhaps you could release the source code for security audit?
I just got a notification from Google that an "archive of my account was requested", so now this extensions is scaring me.
Seems pointless.
A simple filter on gmail can put all of the junk you get into one folder. Then gmail (or any other mainstream email system) is just fine.
twitter.com/hughsheehy/status/1271...
I think G Suite is a necessary evil (don’t be evil irony pun intended). I also agree with others here: The effort required for a “real migration” is off putting.
What I love the most from Hey so far is that I spend near zero time deleting emails I don’t care about (I’m an inbox zero person). There’s a few seconds/minutes every day spent sorting through my gmail inbox, which is small but meaningful if accounted for over a year. Hey transformed that into a Feed that I can scroll through whenever I want without worrying about all the “clicks“ I’m giving away via spy trackers. I don’t see Google implementing any strong privacy feature like this in the future.
I’m also on the fence, but leaning more towards paying and sticking with it. Email is an established industry and a new player won’t just walk through the door with the perfect replacement for everyone. The important missing features should come eventually if that’s what people want/need (giving Basecamp the benefit of the doubt that they will listen to feedback)
I paid for it, and already regret it.
At first I thought I enjoyed the somewhat automated sorting, but as time goes one, I constantly worry that important emails are getting screened out more often than I worried about email going into my junk folder.
I also don't always know where to put things based on their categories. In Gmail, I have tons of automated sorting set up, and again, I never really worry about it, because most of it is highly contextual. If I see a pattern that bothers me, I can create a filter to handle it. With hey, I end up putting some addresses in my "paper trail" that occasionally send things I might want in my Inbox (also, I'm not calling it Imbox).
Overall, yeah - if clout's your thing and you believe a hey.com email address brings you that - go for it, but as for me, I'm content to keep my Gmail and custom domain email addresses.
Great poll though!
This! I find myself checking hey all the time because no notifications by default, for everything! If it’s important, I won’t get notified until I’ve asked hey to notify me, so I’m stuck wondering if I should check my email constantly.
I'd never heard about it and read their pitch on the site. As far as I can see the main point is that it has a fancy spam filter hat blocks everything by default untill you allow senders, and it has some proconfigured folders for different kinds of email like gmail does.
That looks fine but honestly I find that all email services and clients do the job now (Outlook, Thunderbird, Gmail all allow me to handle my mail the way I want), and it sounds like "Hey" won't even allow me to use any client I want ?
I think at this point email is a really mature (if flawed and limited) technology and noone is going to revolutionize the way we handle emails without breaking compatibility and creating a brand new protocol. To me the most exciting technology in that area was Google Wave, but it went the way of all Google messenging apps unfortunately. I guess in a way Slack, Teams, Discord, Hipchat and Mattermost are spiritual successors to Wave, but they won't ever replace emails because there's no unified protocol underneath.
My thoughts are that it's completely self-aggrandising.
They've created artificial scarcity and hype to get people to join, and they're playing off the fact they they made Basecamp, which is inexplicably popular. Basecamp has any number of usability issues. Most people I've met hate having to use it. It's not a recommendation except in that it's a recognised brand.
I say it was hyped, but I hadn't heard of it until someone posted here about making a bot to scrape invitation codes from Twitter.
Hey doesn't do anything unconventional. It has a couple of big friendly buttons instead of a menu item to make your own filter, which is how pretty much every other email client or SAAS product does it. It's also more expensive than its competitors (it's over twice the price of Protonmail for example).
One of its selling points is that you can get an @hey.com email address. To me, that's desperation to fill out a bullet list. You could say the same of any hosted email provider and really, if you're prepared to spend $100 per year, you're likely to have your own domain name for your email address anyway, one that you've been using for the last decade.
You can't "revolutionise" email by moving things around in the UI.
I think it's possible that in a year everyone's using them. Of course I think it's possible - we've seen that happen time and again with products that seemed to offer nothing - but I think it's more likely they'll be the new Yahoo! mail.