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.
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.
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").
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.
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.
Thank you for the long answer. The person I asked made it clear that the "HR failure" was a significant driver in the decision, so it felt like it goes beyond the points 1+2 that you discuss (+)
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.
DHH's retelling of the incident is less bad than some others made it sound, yes. (Although I wouldn't necessarily assume his account is entirely accurate or includes all relevant context either!)
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.
Thank you, again. Now I understand where you come from, much better; and I see which of my assumptions may be wrong.
I think this is where we fundamentally both agree and disagree:
> 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).
Without re-litigating the events at Basecamp, surely you're fully aware that other people have a different view to you (i.e. that in their opinion DHH did do something wrong), and surely from that starting point it's hardly mysterious why people would choose not to use the service.
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?'
My question was perhaps unclear. I'm fully aware other people have a different view, I haven't received yet the answer to "what exactly was wrong in what DHH did" - and not just in the 'maybe he could have handled this better' way, but in the 'so wrong that I want to avoid this company in the future' way.
Two reasons for me! The first is the moral one, which I would not necessarily prescribe to anyone here.
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.
> 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.
I highly appreciate your hard-working skills as the post you published have some great information which is quite beneficial for me, I hope you will post more like that in the future
(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.
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.
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'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.
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-specifi...
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.
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.
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?
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.
>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.
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"...
> Why would they need to leave the "boutique" tag?
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.
>I don’t know why. But the purpose of the marketing campaign of Hey sent that message.
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 are a “boutique” kind-of company. A boutique should excel in niche products (and they did until Hey). Hey was announced as a product to disrupt email and fix the email management problem. That’s not a niche product but a general purpose solution. What they announced (and they did it GREAT) did not match with the product features IMHO.
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?
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.
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.
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
> 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...)
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.
>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.
I'd really recommend 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.
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.
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.
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.
Email market is massive, so carving out a tiny niche could be enough to have a profitable product. There was recently a thread about missive https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26713949
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have a similar setup, but I find the bridge doesn't seem to auto-start correctly, and then Thunderbird generates a bunch of connection errors that I have to manually clear out after manually launching the bridge.
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".
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.
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.
I agree for the browser version, not for the mobile app. It's a shame their Android application is basically just a web app. I often get a notification on my phone, tap on it and have to wait 10 seconds for the web app to do a full refresh and start actually retrieving the message.
It also makes the mobile application unusable offline.
Totally agree with everything you said, but I really appreciate that you can access ALL of the settings from the android app. It drove me up the wall that you can't manage filters and labels and stuff from the gmail app.
Wish they had https://www.claws-mail.org/ for iOS and Android. I remember K9 for Android used to be decent back in the day when Android was on the G1 and OG Droid, no idea if it’s even still around.
This. It's actually one of the things that drove me away from ProtonMail and into the arms of FastMail (for emails that don't need quite that level of security, i.e. most).
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.
Agreed. Renewed for third or fourth year this month, no complaints what so ever. Their interface is so simple, intuitive and fast that it makes every other client and service (especially Gmail) dreadful in comparison.
Migadu has a similar offering (sans the R&D on the JMAP but contribute to https://git.sr.ht/~migadu/alps) but a more reasonable (ie consumption-based) pricing [1] for people who own multiple domains. Just a happy customer.
Migadu dropped its free plan last year in the middle of the pandemic with just one month’s notice to customers. Businesses do need to make money, but this sudden decision with a month's notice during a perilous time was customer hostile. I can’t recommend it just for this reason.
Did they ever have a free plan? I guess not with custom domains. I also know they are a small Swiss company, so the pandemic may have put their existence on the line if they had a surge of free signups.
Reminds me of EndJunk.com that I had almost all of my email through. They were just a catch-all forwarder. Went under one day with zero notice and I lost access to all those addresses. Some services let you recover an account if you remember the password, others make you confirm an email change at the old and new address. I lost those accounts. I’d have been happy to pay for the service instead of them going under.
Fastmail is the creator of the JMAP protocol (now an IETF standard), [1] which is a much better successor to IMAP. IIRC, it also supports it on its servers.
I actually use Microsoft 365. I pay 100 euros per year for 6 people. It is very good. It is just that I wanted to see how good Fastmail is, as many people here love it, but the price for us is crazy high.
Fastmail is quite expensive for more-than-one-person use cases. You can look at Posteo, Mailbox.org, Runbox, Mailfence, etc. They offer cheaper plans and have been around for sometime.
You might like Migadu[0]. Its set up as more of a postmaster tool but does have webmail, and multiple accounts on a domain is a first-class feature. I found out about it from ddvault's recommendations[1].
I like Fastmail, but as they are based in Australia, how do they address the A&A law[0] that requires companies to decrypt data when compelled by the government?
Edit: I found this response[1], which seems to boil down to: "we already were compelled by other laws, so nothing has fundamentally changed"
Fastmail is good enough that I'd suggest going for the 3 year subscription for $130. Unless you've got an investment available that will earn 16.3% annual returns over that time, $130 upfront beats 3 annual payments of $50.
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.
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.
Disclaimer - I have no affiliation with Fastmail. Just a very happy customer.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 207 ms ] threadI 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.
https://simpl.fyi/ https://mimestream.com/
[+] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27003221
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.
> 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
https://kabosucoin.net/
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?
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
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.
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’?
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?
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.
Their "business model is failing"? Says who?
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...)
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.
>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.
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.
I think using webmail is a bad idea after all.
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.
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://www.migadu.com/pricing/
[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.
[0]: https://www.migadu.com/
[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).
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.
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.
There are labels: https://imgur.com/a/BPPrvoG