Thoughts on hey.com

I signed up for hey.com recently and really liked the way they tackle the common problems with email. If this is the first time you are hearing about Hey, do take a look at what it does differently.

Some of the features that stood out to me:

• Clean, simple design that makes reading and managing emails a pleasure.
• The ability to separate important emails from regular newsletters and other drip emails. The “Set Aside” and “Reply later” features may not seem original, but are very well done. Gmail has the automatic categorization as well, but I don’t use it for fear of the system incorrectly categorizing my emails. Hey’s approach is totally based on user input which is 👍 and not based on Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning. I don’t have anything against AI, but prefer control over how my emails are organized.
• The ability to save important pieces of content in the email as “clips”. I used to labels/star emails in Gmail to help me remember this, but it is a chore to always dig through them or search for them. In Hey, it is super nice to be able to go look at all clips in one place and quickly get just what I was looking for.
• The ability to see all conversations and files on a per contact basis. Sure you can do this using search in most email providers, but Hey’s presentation of this information is top-notch.
• Automatic disabling of tracking pixels is very good. I was surprised to see so many emails that had these pixels in them. I guess most of them use common providers that enable tracking functionality.

Things I wish were better with Hey:

• The ability to select all/multiple messages under a folder (feed, paper trail etc) and batch delete them. It is possible to select messages, just not a one-click select all.
• I miss Gmail’s “Filter messages like this…” feature that enable me to search for similar emails and either bulk delete, apply labels, or move them to a different folder. I know the team at Basecamp is focused and very thoughtful about what they put out. I hope the above features get prioritized and addressed in later releases.

Things I haven't yet tried with Hey (mostly because I haven't had the need to):

• The ability to ignore a long running threaded conversation.
• The ability to attach huge files to an email and have the recipient automatically get a download link for that file.
• The ability to attach private notes to an email.
• The speak easy code that enables senders to add a unique code to add to the subject line. This helps that email bypass the screener.

I really enjoyed listening to the podcast where Basecamp design lead Jonas Downey shares his experiences of building the just launched email service hey.com. And one thing he said stuck out to me:

We worked very hard on ensuring that emails from any source look good. This was perhaps the hardest thing we did when working on Hey.

I could not quite put my finger on why I first liked Hey so much, but now I do. Making emails look good is indeed a very hard problem — given the diverse range of sources — but the Hey team has done an amazing job. Above all, this one feature may be the deciding factor that nudges me to finally start paying for Hey.