Some Thoughts on Hey
as I need to decide whether or not to pay…
I’m on the last day of my trial for Hey, the new email service from the Basecamp team. I’m debating whether or not to pay for it, so I thought I’d jot down my thoughts to help me process.
At first, I didn’t really like Hey. It felt too heavy-handed and a bit too garish on the design side, for my taste. But I’ve gotten into it a bit more in the past week or so, probably because I started forwarding an old Gmail address here, and it has made me realize just how much junk I get in my inbox on a regular basis.
I mean, I know this. I of all people know this. I’ve made a micro-career out of complaining about email and inbox overload. But the reality is that I’ve also gotten burnt out complaining about email because it just doesn’t solve anything. Even when I quit, I had to come back. Because email is unfortunately a necessary evil in our current age.¹
And that’s actually what I’ve come to like about Hey. it forces me to think differently about email. Why do I keep these things in my inbox to respond to later when I know damn well I’m never going to? Why do I just accept blind emails sent from the dark and treat them as if they’re something to which I need to respond? Because of etiquette? Please, we’re far beyond that in 2020. Or we should be, but we’re not.
Part of it is the way email was set up. Anyone can send you one as long as they know your address. And back when such volume was low, you were expected to respond. Hell, you may have even enjoyed it. I know I did! But times have changed, to put it mildly. And now not only do many people know your email now thanks to Google and other tools, thousands of bots and lists and other more nefarious things do as well. Now is not the time to be polite.
That’s why I appreciate Hey’s “Screener” feature. It forces you to make a decision: should this person/account be able to send you email? Yes or no? (Yes, with some granularity on where it should go if you grant access.)
In some ways, I’ve been manually doing this process for years. I use Gmail filters liberally to filter things out of my inbox the moment they hit it. Instead, much of my email is auto-archived, which I do mainly because of Gmail’s “unlimited” storage (which is more “limited” by the day, as I have to keep upping my storage amount — though that’s mainly due to Google Photos, which is well worth it!). I want to be able to search my entire email history with Gmail, and I often do. This is useful.
Still, that’s hardly a great front-end for actually using email on a daily basis. Gmail is more of my email catch-all, so maybe it is time for another type of service to actually do email.
The other core element of Hey that I like is the idea of “Reply Later” which, at least on the desktop (and iPad!), gives you an interface to pound through a bunch of emails you’ve saved up quickly. This is what I tend to naturally do with email anyway — “Focus & Reply” has a nice ring to it — though others are different and insist on responding to anything they’re going to respond to right away.
I also like the “Set Aside” area, which is similar in theory to something like ‘Starred’ or ‘Flagged’ in other email services, but again, I appreciate the idea of getting those out of your actual inbox and putting them somewhere else to come back to later.
At first, I was going through my “Imbox” (yeah, a little too cute for my taste) and trying to delete anything I was done with. But that’s a little too cumbersome here. So instead, I now just let it flow down to the “Previously Seen” area, which I think is fine. I like being able to label certain things I need to group together (which you can also do in Gmail, of course) as well as add sticky notes to some emails for glanceable context (though it’s a little confusing that there’s this and a ‘note-to-self’ feature within threads).
“The Feed” is a nice idea for newsletters and other types of emails which are less emails in the traditional sense and more information vessels. To be honest, I haven’t gotten into using it that much yet. This is another thing I was already doing manually with email (well automatically with Gmail filters, which I set up manually). I filter all newsletters into their own “Newsletters” folder, so it’s the same basic idea. Though I think I actually prefer my folder for this versus a scrollable feed for all the newsletters expanded to show initial content and context.
“Paper Trail” makes sense for receipts and the like. But again, I’ll probably keep those going to Gmail so they’re all saved and searchable.
“Clips” — a sort of clipboard to store little snippets from email is brilliant.
My biggest gripe with Hey has actually been speed. By removing all the legacy cruft of Gmail and other older email services, and making native iOS and Mac apps, you’d think it would be insanely fast. But I’m experiencing a lot of loading times on my end for simple things, like opening the compose window or clicking on “The Feed”. Hopefully these are just typical scaling issues…
So, you see, there are things I like. And things I don’t. And things I’m already doing. In many ways, I wish all email clients just did what Hey is doing with “The Screener” if for no other reason to break the mentality that email is something you owe a response to. It would help shift it from opt-out to opt-in.
Still, reading this over I think Hey has piqued my interest enough and gotten me to think a bit differently about email where I’m going to pay up for the year. It’s not cheap at $99/year (or more for a 2-letter or 3-letter address) but even Apple kerfuffle aside, I appreciate what they’re trying to do here.
¹ So much so that I actually have a major life goal built around it: I’ll know I’ve truly succeeded in life when I no longer have to check email on a regular basis. I’m not kidding, this is honestly an aspiration I have. To get to that point. One day…
