The skinny on Hey<\/h2>\n\n- It’s a web-based email system.<\/li>\n
- It only works with @hey.com<\/strong> email addresses. The company has started onboarding companies<\/a> who want to move their team’s email to Hey, but it’s not widely available yet.<\/li>\n
- It’s invite-only<\/strong> for now.<\/li>\n
- It costs $99\/yr or more<\/strong> if you want a two or three-letter username<\/strong> @hey.com.<\/li>\n
- About 100,000 people have requested access, according to Jason Fried<\/a>.<\/li>\n
- It has some neat features like blocking open-tracking pixels<\/strong> by default (bad for guys like me)<\/em> and being able to see all of your attachments<\/strong> sent from everyone in one place. Its screener makes you apply a Yes\/No to everyone that’s emailing you for the first time<\/strong>, which then determines where future emails are routed. It features an “Imbox” instead of an Inbox, and although plenty of people are annoyed by this, Jason Fried and company insist that itsnotatypo.com<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.gmass.co\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/Screenshot-2020-06-18-03.54.35-1024x822.png\")
<\/h2>\nWill Hey become wildly popular, displacing Gmail as the #1 email service for entrepreneurs and startups?<\/h2>\n
I doubt it. Hey will likely succeed as a niche email tool<\/strong> and a moneymaker for Basecamp, Inc.<\/strong>, but it’s unlikely to be a dominant force in the consumer or business email market.<\/p>\nPeople love to hate email, so whenever a new email app arrives onto the scene, it feels exciting. I tried Superhuman last year but quickly switched back to Gmail.<\/strong> I’m a special case, though, because I use Gmail in a way that nobody else in the world uses it \u2014 I use it to manage every aspect of my company. Every time a new user signs up for GMass, a notification goes into a special Label<\/strong>. Every time a user launches a campaign, a notification goes into a special Label<\/strong>. Why do I do this? So that when I’m handling a support issue for a user, I can search for any user by their email, inside my Gmail account, and immediately pull up a history of everything they’ve done. Gmail’s exceptional search capabilities make this all possible.<\/em><\/p>\nAdditionally, once I was turned onto Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts<\/a>, the productivity advantage of Superhuman disappeared<\/strong>.<\/p>\nThe biggest drawback of using any email client outside of Gmail is that it will never have the vast ecosystem of third-party developers building added functionality<\/strong> for it. There are already hints that Hey will be a mostly closed ecosystem<\/strong>, given that you can neither relay email via SMTP to a hey.com address or retrieve your hey.com messages over POP or IMAP. Perhaps there will eventually be an API. Still, unless alternative solutions like Hey and Superhuman are willing to natively<\/em> add demographic information to contacts<\/a>, help you turn emails into to-do items<\/a>, and tell you how to write a message to a particular person<\/a>, they’ll never be able to compete on features. Other Gmail extensions add email tracking<\/a> and auto follow-ups<\/a>, both of which are useful to a sender of emails.<\/p>\nSince Hey is decidedly anti-spying<\/strong>, it would create quite the kerfuffle if it were to add pixel-based open tracking<\/strong> to the service as a user of Hey but then tout the blocking of said pixels on the receiving end as a feature and more-so a product mantra. Superhuman fell victim to this when a blogger “discovered” that by default it includes the tracking pixel<\/a> in all sent emails, although I never understood why this was such a big deal. If I’m a user of any email client, I’d love to know when my emails are opened.<\/em><\/p>\nFor some reason, privacy advocates get far more riled up over marketers knowing you’ve opened an email than knowing every move you make on every website, which is fairly commonplace if you’ve ever logged into a website or if you’ve ever clicked on a Facebook ad and then browsed the advertiser’s site.<\/p>\n
Additionally, Gmail already natively includes scheduling<\/a>, snoozing<\/a>, and smart text suggestions<\/a>, not to mention the best email search function on the planet<\/strong>. Given that Gmail is made by Google, and Google’s almost-trillion-dollar business is based mostly on its ability to accurately dole out search results faster than you can compose your next thought<\/strong>, it’s unlikely that any alternative email service will be able to provide a search function that’s better than Gmail’s native search function<\/a>.<\/p>\nAbout that Screener<\/h2>\n
Hey’s primary method for sorting out email that you want from email that you don’t want is the Screener<\/a>, a place where all first time emailers end up, and you, as the user, have to choose YES or NO to each sender. It’s a simple way of deciding what’s spam<\/strong> and what’s not.<\/p>\nThere’s one major problem with this approach. It requires a LOT of manual work<\/strong>. In the beginning, as @hey.com addresses are new, users won’t mind this. In fact, on Twitter, new Hey users delight at getting new email<\/strong> just like they did when email first became commonplace in the late 90s with AOL Mail<\/strong>. Over time though, as you use your new @hey.com address more and more, working your way through the Screener will become as tiresome as trying to achieve Inbox Zero with a “regular” email platform.<\/p>\nHere is where Gmail is far superior.<\/em> Most people have never heard of TensorFlow<\/a>, an open source machine learning AI platform<\/strong> developed by Google that Gmail is now using to<\/strong> block spam<\/strong>. Can Hey match this? Possibly, but as smart as Basecamp’s engineers are, the kind of computer science expertise required to build AI-based systems goes far beyond being able to create beautiful UIs for project management systems and email platforms.<\/p>\nHow about Hey vs. G Suite and Docs, Sheets, Calendar, YouTube, and more?<\/h2>\n
If you host your company’s email on G Suite, then you’re probably also using Google’s Calendar<\/strong>, Google Docs<\/strong>, and a bunch of other Google services like YouTube<\/strong> and Meet<\/strong> are likely tied to your G Suite account address. Fortunately for these users, it is possible<\/em> to switch to Hey for email, but keep the rest of your G Suite services. This is due to the nature of how email works, and the magical DNS MX record<\/strong>\u00a0that controls it all. If my domain, mywidgets.com, wants to use Hey for email but keep my G Suite services alive<\/strong>, all I have to do is change the MX record for mywidgets.com<\/strong> to point to Hey, and now I can host all of my @mywidgets.com email accounts at Hey but still log into all of my\u00a0 G Suite services using the same @mywidgets.com accounts created on G Suite. The only difference is that email messages sent to @mywidgets.com will no longer appear in Gmail.<\/p>\nThe drawback of this hybrid approach<\/strong> is that you’ll be forced to pay the monthly fee for G Suite and<\/em> for Hey<\/strong>, and that “double” cost is unlikely to be palatable to most businesses. The only sustainable solution to this would be if Google uncoupled the Gmail service from the rest of the G Suite services<\/strong>, and that’s just not going to happen.<\/p>\nThe key difference between Hey and Superhuman<\/h2>\n
Hey is both an email client, via its web-based app, and an email hosting service<\/strong>. As a user of hey, you have an @hey.com email address which you then manage through the Hey website or app.<\/p>\nSuperhuman is only an email client.<\/strong> It works on top of other services like Gmail. With Superhuman, you keep your @gmail.com or G Suite account, and you use Superhuman to send and receive emails from those same addresses. With Superhuman, you can also use the Gmail app or web-based client to send\/receive. With Hey, you are locked into the Hey website or app<\/strong> to manage your @hey.com address.<\/p>\nThe advantage of Hey’s approach is they can offer users a new beginning<\/strong>, with a new email address<\/strong>, for people that are sick of the volume of email they receive at their current address. Of course, you can also solve that problem by creating a new @gmail.com address \u2014 but you’re not likely to get tom@gmail.com, whereas you probably can get tom@hey.com for a price.<\/p>\nThe disadvantage of Hey’s approach is that new beginnings are not easy<\/em>. Because you can’t just slip Hey’s email client over your existing email client, it’s not nearly as easy to switch to it. Establishing a new email address that will become your primary email address is hard<\/em>. You have to inform everyone you’re in touch with that you have a new email address, hope they update their contacts, and further hope they never reply to an old thread with your old email address. You could forward your old email address<\/strong> to your new @hey.com address, but that’s clunky and can break threads.<\/p>\nHow desirable is having a hey.com email address?<\/h2>\n
For me, the litmus test of an awesome email address is whether I can utter my email address to a customer service rep over the phone without any ambiguity<\/strong> as to its spelling.<\/p>\nLet’s say I had the account me@hey.com (I don’t), and I say over the phone, “My email is me at hey dot com.” That’s still ambiguous. Is it “hey” dot com, or is it “hay” dot com?<\/p>\n
“Sorry, was that ‘hey’ or ‘hi’?” I foresee someone asking.<\/p>\n
The only way for this issue to become moot would be if the Hey email service became as ubiquitous as Gmail or Yahoo Mail, and even if that happens, it will take time<\/strong>.<\/p>\nHey’s battle with Apple<\/h2>\n
Hey is currently in a fight with Apple<\/a> because Apple is refusing to publish the latest version of the Hey app unless they include in-app purchase functionality in the app (see update below). As a subscription service, Hey charges a minimum of $99\/yr, and Apple is arguing that the app must offer in-app purchases to be compliant with App store policies, and so that Apple can take its 30% cut.<\/p>\nIt’s hard to feel bad for Hey, though, because although I believe them when they say this isn’t a PR stunt, the amount of publicity this battle is generating is insane<\/strong>. Every tech site you can think of is covering the story from TechCrunch<\/a> to The Verge<\/a> to protocol<\/a>. Furthermore, Superhuman had the same issue, did comply with Apple’s requirements, and is happy with the results<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\nWe received a similar notice from Apple and went back-and-forth w\/their App Store team. Unless we built our own phones, we had no choice but to make it work. And we’re happy with the outcome.<\/p>\n
There’s a soln for every app developer in working w\/Apple. Just need to find the way.<\/p>\n
\u2014 Vivek Sodera (@vsodera) June 16, 2020<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/h2>\nWill Hey become wildly popular, displacing Gmail as the #1 email service for entrepreneurs and startups?<\/h2>\n
I doubt it. Hey will likely succeed as a niche email tool<\/strong> and a moneymaker for Basecamp, Inc.<\/strong>, but it’s unlikely to be a dominant force in the consumer or business email market.<\/p>\n People love to hate email, so whenever a new email app arrives onto the scene, it feels exciting. I tried Superhuman last year but quickly switched back to Gmail.<\/strong> I’m a special case, though, because I use Gmail in a way that nobody else in the world uses it \u2014 I use it to manage every aspect of my company. Every time a new user signs up for GMass, a notification goes into a special Label<\/strong>. Every time a user launches a campaign, a notification goes into a special Label<\/strong>. Why do I do this? So that when I’m handling a support issue for a user, I can search for any user by their email, inside my Gmail account, and immediately pull up a history of everything they’ve done. Gmail’s exceptional search capabilities make this all possible.<\/em><\/p>\n Additionally, once I was turned onto Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts<\/a>, the productivity advantage of Superhuman disappeared<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The biggest drawback of using any email client outside of Gmail is that it will never have the vast ecosystem of third-party developers building added functionality<\/strong> for it. There are already hints that Hey will be a mostly closed ecosystem<\/strong>, given that you can neither relay email via SMTP to a hey.com address or retrieve your hey.com messages over POP or IMAP. Perhaps there will eventually be an API. Still, unless alternative solutions like Hey and Superhuman are willing to natively<\/em> add demographic information to contacts<\/a>, help you turn emails into to-do items<\/a>, and tell you how to write a message to a particular person<\/a>, they’ll never be able to compete on features. Other Gmail extensions add email tracking<\/a> and auto follow-ups<\/a>, both of which are useful to a sender of emails.<\/p>\n Since Hey is decidedly anti-spying<\/strong>, it would create quite the kerfuffle if it were to add pixel-based open tracking<\/strong> to the service as a user of Hey but then tout the blocking of said pixels on the receiving end as a feature and more-so a product mantra. Superhuman fell victim to this when a blogger “discovered” that by default it includes the tracking pixel<\/a> in all sent emails, although I never understood why this was such a big deal. If I’m a user of any email client, I’d love to know when my emails are opened.<\/em><\/p>\n For some reason, privacy advocates get far more riled up over marketers knowing you’ve opened an email than knowing every move you make on every website, which is fairly commonplace if you’ve ever logged into a website or if you’ve ever clicked on a Facebook ad and then browsed the advertiser’s site.<\/p>\n Additionally, Gmail already natively includes scheduling<\/a>, snoozing<\/a>, and smart text suggestions<\/a>, not to mention the best email search function on the planet<\/strong>. Given that Gmail is made by Google, and Google’s almost-trillion-dollar business is based mostly on its ability to accurately dole out search results faster than you can compose your next thought<\/strong>, it’s unlikely that any alternative email service will be able to provide a search function that’s better than Gmail’s native search function<\/a>.<\/p>\n Hey’s primary method for sorting out email that you want from email that you don’t want is the Screener<\/a>, a place where all first time emailers end up, and you, as the user, have to choose YES or NO to each sender. It’s a simple way of deciding what’s spam<\/strong> and what’s not.<\/p>\n There’s one major problem with this approach. It requires a LOT of manual work<\/strong>. In the beginning, as @hey.com addresses are new, users won’t mind this. In fact, on Twitter, new Hey users delight at getting new email<\/strong> just like they did when email first became commonplace in the late 90s with AOL Mail<\/strong>. Over time though, as you use your new @hey.com address more and more, working your way through the Screener will become as tiresome as trying to achieve Inbox Zero with a “regular” email platform.<\/p>\n Here is where Gmail is far superior.<\/em> Most people have never heard of TensorFlow<\/a>, an open source machine learning AI platform<\/strong> developed by Google that Gmail is now using to<\/strong> block spam<\/strong>. Can Hey match this? Possibly, but as smart as Basecamp’s engineers are, the kind of computer science expertise required to build AI-based systems goes far beyond being able to create beautiful UIs for project management systems and email platforms.<\/p>\n If you host your company’s email on G Suite, then you’re probably also using Google’s Calendar<\/strong>, Google Docs<\/strong>, and a bunch of other Google services like YouTube<\/strong> and Meet<\/strong> are likely tied to your G Suite account address. Fortunately for these users, it is possible<\/em> to switch to Hey for email, but keep the rest of your G Suite services. This is due to the nature of how email works, and the magical DNS MX record<\/strong>\u00a0that controls it all. If my domain, mywidgets.com, wants to use Hey for email but keep my G Suite services alive<\/strong>, all I have to do is change the MX record for mywidgets.com<\/strong> to point to Hey, and now I can host all of my @mywidgets.com email accounts at Hey but still log into all of my\u00a0 G Suite services using the same @mywidgets.com accounts created on G Suite. The only difference is that email messages sent to @mywidgets.com will no longer appear in Gmail.<\/p>\n The drawback of this hybrid approach<\/strong> is that you’ll be forced to pay the monthly fee for G Suite and<\/em> for Hey<\/strong>, and that “double” cost is unlikely to be palatable to most businesses. The only sustainable solution to this would be if Google uncoupled the Gmail service from the rest of the G Suite services<\/strong>, and that’s just not going to happen.<\/p>\n Hey is both an email client, via its web-based app, and an email hosting service<\/strong>. As a user of hey, you have an @hey.com email address which you then manage through the Hey website or app.<\/p>\n Superhuman is only an email client.<\/strong> It works on top of other services like Gmail. With Superhuman, you keep your @gmail.com or G Suite account, and you use Superhuman to send and receive emails from those same addresses. With Superhuman, you can also use the Gmail app or web-based client to send\/receive. With Hey, you are locked into the Hey website or app<\/strong> to manage your @hey.com address.<\/p>\n The advantage of Hey’s approach is they can offer users a new beginning<\/strong>, with a new email address<\/strong>, for people that are sick of the volume of email they receive at their current address. Of course, you can also solve that problem by creating a new @gmail.com address \u2014 but you’re not likely to get tom@gmail.com, whereas you probably can get tom@hey.com for a price.<\/p>\n The disadvantage of Hey’s approach is that new beginnings are not easy<\/em>. Because you can’t just slip Hey’s email client over your existing email client, it’s not nearly as easy to switch to it. Establishing a new email address that will become your primary email address is hard<\/em>. You have to inform everyone you’re in touch with that you have a new email address, hope they update their contacts, and further hope they never reply to an old thread with your old email address. You could forward your old email address<\/strong> to your new @hey.com address, but that’s clunky and can break threads.<\/p>\n For me, the litmus test of an awesome email address is whether I can utter my email address to a customer service rep over the phone without any ambiguity<\/strong> as to its spelling.<\/p>\n Let’s say I had the account me@hey.com (I don’t), and I say over the phone, “My email is me at hey dot com.” That’s still ambiguous. Is it “hey” dot com, or is it “hay” dot com?<\/p>\n “Sorry, was that ‘hey’ or ‘hi’?” I foresee someone asking.<\/p>\n The only way for this issue to become moot would be if the Hey email service became as ubiquitous as Gmail or Yahoo Mail, and even if that happens, it will take time<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Hey is currently in a fight with Apple<\/a> because Apple is refusing to publish the latest version of the Hey app unless they include in-app purchase functionality in the app (see update below). As a subscription service, Hey charges a minimum of $99\/yr, and Apple is arguing that the app must offer in-app purchases to be compliant with App store policies, and so that Apple can take its 30% cut.<\/p>\n It’s hard to feel bad for Hey, though, because although I believe them when they say this isn’t a PR stunt, the amount of publicity this battle is generating is insane<\/strong>. Every tech site you can think of is covering the story from TechCrunch<\/a> to The Verge<\/a> to protocol<\/a>. Furthermore, Superhuman had the same issue, did comply with Apple’s requirements, and is happy with the results<\/strong>.<\/p>\n We received a similar notice from Apple and went back-and-forth w\/their App Store team. Unless we built our own phones, we had no choice but to make it work. And we’re happy with the outcome.<\/p>\n There’s a soln for every app developer in working w\/Apple. Just need to find the way.<\/p>\n \u2014 Vivek Sodera (@vsodera) June 16, 2020<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\nAbout that Screener<\/h2>\n
How about Hey vs. G Suite and Docs, Sheets, Calendar, YouTube, and more?<\/h2>\n
The key difference between Hey and Superhuman<\/h2>\n
How desirable is having a hey.com email address?<\/h2>\n
Hey’s battle with Apple<\/h2>\n
\n