Yep. Lost me with no IMAP and delayed (if ever) support for own-domain mail. The marketing-speak is well-crafted, the site itself is beautiful, and I’ve read that the code behind it is impressively “performant,” as the kids say these days, but … nah.
Just forward your mail from the existing account to test.
Just watched the video in detail. My two cents (which turned out to be quite long):
I think there’s value in the proposition of Hey. They have refined all the “hacks” and services power users have used for years to get email under control. They have essentially “baked in” the triage / GTD concepts to their inbox, decoupling processing from answering, secondary information and reference from things you need to act upon. It’s smart and I can totally see people many people (such as my parents…) taking great advantage of such a service.
However –
It’s no wonder we are so lukewarm towards this service on this forum. The concepts Hey talks about have been known to us for years, but we have to remember they are not known to the wider world.
If:
- You already apply the GTD workflow of processing emails as soon as they come in, to identify tasks and defer them to get them out of the inbox as soon as possible, and archive important data where you can find it later
- You have some kind of filtering in place (whether Sanebox or custom rules)
- You ruthlessly unsubscribe to newsletters or forward them to read-later services (Instapaper, feed readers…)
Hey will add nothing to your workflow.
Additionally, there is something that bugs me in the Hey philosophy, which is totally understandable, but which I don’t think is how email should ultimately work. It is that you basically keep all info (notes, tasks, attachments) inside Hey attached to emails. I get the design choice: once again, people whose digital life is a mess and who don’t have the time (or interest) to implement a paperless system will be happy to find that information at least somewhere (inside their email app, where it used to live anyway but they couldn’t find it).
But personally, I don’t think ideally this is how information and tasks should live.
- We have increasingly diverse communications channels (social media messengers, instant messaging, Slack, and of course email). Having information live in those silos is a recipe for scattering. In true GTD fashion, I believe the important information should be lifted out of the silos as soon as possible and put into your information repository of choice (notes app, “second brain”).
- Same goes for tasks. The advantage of having email tasks (or tasks signalling you’re awaiting replies) all centralised in your task system is that you can immediately see where the bottlenecks are. If you’re awaiting replies from people currently on vacation to move forward on a project, you will see it right away alongside the other tasks instead of wondering why this is not moving forward (“Ah, yeah, I must have put a note in Hey, what was it, ah, okay, Jill is on vacation…”)
I have recently committed to adhering strictly to a task-manager based email workflow as an experiment, putting tasks in there with backlinks to threads when I couldn’t answer to stuff on the spot. This initially seemed like a lot of overhead but actually the time investment pays back. When I “do” email I just have to go through that task list, and more importantly, I have the “waiting-for” in the same place. There’s a lot to be said for centralised systems when it comes to processing information and tasks.
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I’ve been looking forward to seeing what this product would be all about.
It looks beautiful. But it’s not for me.
I’ve written a blogpost outlining how to replicate most of these features with a combo of Fastmail, SaneBox and MailMate.
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I don’t know. They are starting slow and inviting more each day. They said they will get through their invite backlog within a few weeks. By July 15th, anyone can sign up.
Good comments above. I’m willing to give up some manually crafted email setup if the UX of Hey works well enough. There isn’t an email client like theirs. I also want a hey.com email address with just my name (they’ll keep it forever, even if I stop paying, and let me forward it.)
Overall I suspect this will appeal to people who kind of wish they could do all their emailing inside of Basecamp. I’ve been such a person for years. 
Here’s my ideal mail client, roughly
I don’t want a long list of items, I want conversations with people. When I look at my inbox, that’s the mental transformation I have to make. A layout like this would reduce the cognitive load of email (IMO).
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My low-ranking opinion commentary here (I can’t really add to what others have said, so I’ll play the role of cranky old man):
- $99 feels a bit steep. I like what I see but I’m also distrustful, given how they took Basecamp, a platform I knew well, and gimmicked it up.
- If I’m paying money, then I would rather support Protonmail, as I am far more conscientious about secure email and restricting government.
- Get off my lawn.
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This. This is what I’m trying to get away from. I want to get email related things out of my email client. I don’t need more organization within my email client. I don’t want yet another thing to have to organize or think about.
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Same for me, but that’s us. Most people, especially at work, use email for or with task management and reminders.
I think this could be useful for most people because don’t have a good GTD or zero-inbox workflow, and the pricing offers enough functionality over Sanebox to justify it.
Then again most people refuse to pay for email, so the market for this product - and its focus - should be on businesses and teams, which will pay for a product like this if it can improve the morass that email can be. Given the company behind it I’m a little surprised they didn’t open it up first to existing customers and GTD-YouTubers and the like. This is really not a consumer product, because the consumer market doesn’t have enough people willing to pay $100/year to help revamp their email.
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But it can’t be a business product either because no business is going to have employees use @hey.com email addresses.
So the market must be for home users.
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That’s one reason why the rollout seems like a mess to me. (And Basecamp has had problems targeting customers before.) Pricing seems fair, but it they’re focusing on the consumer market that Sanebox uses, they’re aiming at a really small niche.
Maybe they released too early, as they’re promising user domain email support by the end of the year.
They’re launching the business product later, along with custom domains.
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So this is essentially a paid beta test using excited individual Basecamp loyalists, before they roll out to where the real money is in businesses?
No, they’re not focusing on Basecamp users at all. They offered previews to The Verge and other sites to promote it as a consumer product right now.
As for ‘paid beta test’ I could say that about a lot of apps that have come out over the years, even today (cough ROAM cough).
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I was talking about Hey with my wife. She has her own domain and is a user of Fastmail (after I converted her from Gmail). She prefers the web interfaces rather than using email applications.
She doesn’t love Fastmail, mainly because of its UI. This is her opinion after using it.
She also has her own domain.
In talking with her, we realised that she is the perfect candidate for Hey - as soon as they allow for custom domains.
Not sure if my wife is an avatar for an addressable market, but it’s a start.
I agree. I just don’t have a major problem with dealing with email. I have 200 employees and four email addresses. I can get a lot of email - hundreds a week. Right now as I write this I have four emails to process. I‘m rigorous with creating rules, not giving out my personal email except very selectively, in unsubscribing from anything that is sent to me that I don’t want, and asking individuals in email threads to remove me from the bcc and cc syndrome unless I actually need to make a decision or give a personal response to something. Following these practices enables me to process important emails while avoiding the often cited “overwhelm” with email. In short, while there are technical issues involved, this is mainly a behavioral issue as you state. I think we need to change peoples’ expectations when it comes to email and be rigorous in maintaining digital minimalism as much as possible when it comes to email.
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@JohnAtl I like the idea but for me the problem would be that almost all of my emails are project related as indicated in the subject line with many people involved. Consequently, a person-centric approach, while appealing, probably would not work for me.
Thanks
That was my reasoning behind the “meta-analysis team”, email from any of those people would be considered project-related. Of course the corner case is that some/all are involved in multiple projects with you. If people were disciplined, they could tag a message as being related to a certain project - but we still have people that Reply All Having said that, if this interface provided a way to send an email to the team (click the team icon, Send Email), the email client could take care of tagging.
I like the innovative thinking. Intriguing. 
I feel a little embarrassed about this since the takeaway on this thread is mostly thumbs down, but I’m sold. I’ve been an inbox zero-er forever and have all sorts of hacks, but this seems to hit a lot of pain points elegantly and I’m eager to try it out.
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