> Any thoughts on the likelihood of Hey.com going under in the near future?
I don't think this is likely. 3-6 months of payroll for 1/3 of staff will be a hit but not existential. I don't think they would've offered such generous severance if they couldn't afford it.
I expect the biggest impact to us as customers (or former customers) is that new feature development will slow down because of the reduced team size.
I think there is a difference between employees coming and going and losing 1/3 of your staff as well as your entire iOS development team. I'm not predicting they are going under. But I'd not be surprised if Hey.com as a product doesn't go away.
Just want to echo the endorsement of Fastmail. They also have a webpage that compares their service to Hey and shows how to recreate the Hey experience in Fastmail: https://www.fastmail.com/hey-fastmail/
The website has a pretty clear page about the spy pixel blocking that claims they block "98%", not 100%. They have a listing of which ones they block, too.
There are many, many methods to accomplish the type of tracking that spy pixels do. It's a game of whack-a-mole for Hey to try and figure them out and block them. I believe they've documented at least one case where a company changed its method after Hey launched.
Why do you say they don't encrypt data at rest? They claim on their hey.com/security page to encrypt "at rest" as well as "at work". Which is a bit above and beyond from my experience. And access to customer data by employees is also logged.
I’m on the standard $5/month 30GB storage plan. There’s also the basic 2GB for $3/month or professional 100GB for $9/month. All include 600+ aliases, and the standard & professional plans give you option to use your own domains, limit is 100 I believe.
I will try this!!! Whoa! Way better. You'd think Hey support would have mentioned this tip. Guess they really dig their email philosophy! Hehehe
I agree with your point in 3, except that I do want to go through all my newsletters, like TED.com, and a bunch of others, but my Feed is mostly ads and flyers, so I wanted to delete those in bulk, and then go through 8 months worth of newsletters.
I am in an outlier situation where I didn't use my Hey.com email for 8 months (Basically when I had to do remote teaching and couldn't even find time to watch a full movie).
Maybe you're right and it wasn't clear enough that you couldn't use the email as a sending alias after you leave, I wouldn't even have considered this honestly.
They've been pretty clear though that they're not considering adding smtp access right now.
You're in a similar situation than me where Hey isn't just the right fit for me right now. It still forwarding emails to an email account on a domain name I choosed and own, so it's easier to say goodbye to that hey.com alias.
I use a text expander when I which works mostly fine if you remember the keyboard combos. I use https://beeftext.org/ on windows but there are many alternatives. Most have also a variable scheme to autofill names and stuff.
You cannot receive emails on multiple servers with one domain.
You can send from multiple servers though. If you want to use an additional SMTP service with your domain you can.
I use smtp2go for that. For low volumes it is free.
Just configure the DNS instructions they provide along with HEY's and you will be fine.
I would suggest downloading your emails, which Hey allows you to do, and also create an account somewhere to forward all future Hey emails to in case the whole thing goes under.
I am keeping my fingers crossed that they keep going as I really like Hey.com and I'm paid up through September.
> HEY for Domains includes: > The best of HEY, and then some > Each user gets everything included with the personal HEY plan, except for an @hey.com email address and a personal blog.
Looks like HEY for Domains is still not a superset of Hey for You
I had thought that consumer Hey didn't allow sending as any address other than your *@hey.com, but it looks like they did add in SMTP sending support. However it doesn't work for "services with more complicated authentication requirements or restrictions, like Gmail, Google hosted domains, and some Office 365 setups".
Technically, it's not different. The biggest difference is that Hey is fundamentally designed around this workflow. You are required to screen in each address, and the UI is designed to give you an easy choice of where to deliver the emails as you do this. You could establish rules in Gmail for every single address, but it would be tedious because the UI wasn't conceived for that.
Not sorting by AI is part of the Hey manifesto: https://hey.com/the-hey-way/#hi-not-ai
I mean it may still be a bug that should be corrected. You usually are suppose to keep your @hey address even after cutting your subscription but only for forwarding.
Check https://hey.com/pricing/
They have notifications, just not app badges. See here.
You can also use the new iOS widgets to have a glimpse into your Imbox, Feed or Paper Trail without needing to open the app.
I don't know what OP's deal is either but they should read HEY's Refund Policy which states:
>If you were really not happy with HEY, you can have your money back.
No reason to pay $100/year (at minimum) if you aren't all in.
Paying for custom domain access through Hey is a tough sell. As it stands now, I can pay $100/year for a Microsoft 365 family subscription that allows custom domain access along with (there may be oethers):
For the price of Hey.com, I shouldn't have to also pay for custom domain access.
According to this:
@hey address is $99 a year Custom domain is $12 a month per user
Therefore if you want both (@hey address and your custom domain) it will be $243 a year.
I think Hey wants to move away the paradigm "I need to see everything so I don't miss anything" towards "Missing some newsletters doesn't decrease my quality of life and reduces time I spent on email".
"Email is a river. Let it flow." https://hey.com/flow/
#3 is tricky to do if you don’t own the domain due to SPF/DKIM/DMARC — (#6) if you own the domain, custom domains are coming https://hey.com/custom-domains
#5 it’s an electron-based clone of the web app - so it doesn’t have anything extra the web app doesn’t have
Read their Manifesto. Go with the flow.
https://hey.com/the-hey-way/#flow
> Rather than encourage people to keep cleaning up their inbox, or attempting to achieve inbox zero, HEY takes > advantage of time. You can’t get to inbox zero in HEY. You can’t even archive emails in HEY. When you read an email, it > just moves down, and, eventually, moves off when newer emails come and take its place. In HEY, emails just flow, they > don't pile up. Let go.
I guess my issue would be that your paper trail will get full up of stuff that isn't really paper trail, as you're using it as an archive for random emails you're done with and not just 'paper trail' bits. So it may become difficult to manage or sift through in the future.
I've realised I have no problem with not having a screener as all it really is is rigid automated rules, and starting a fresh. So starting any new email account gets you a screener as you can then choose what correspondence you get and set up rules for accounts. Those rules can also be way more flexible on other services, so a [email protected] account could have multiple rules for invoices, newsletters, general correspondence based on subject line rather than a blanket rule based on the email.
If it works for you then absolutely go for it, just seems too big a compromise to me when Hey.com is unlikely to flex it's policies.
I'm liking some features of Hey, but $99 for only a hey.com domain would be tough pill to swallow. If they won't commit to including custom domains in that price, I'm feeling doubtful I'll commit to Hey until they do (or if there's a additional charge, it'd better be darn minimal).
I can give you similar example that made me decide not pay for Hey. Here, in The Netherlands, we have discount online retailer- zalando-lounge.nl - every day they send me list of brands that are on sale. Most of the time I delete these emails, but sometimes I order using their links. Then I receive invoice from the same address - now where is this supposed to go? The Feed or The Paper Trail? And finally - weeks later I will receive shipment confirmation, again from the same email address - this one should come to my imbox + have notification on so I can make sure I am available for delivery.
My emails can not be organised based on the sender alone and at the moment that is the only option offered by hey.com.
That is intentional, if you read the manifesto - https://hey.com/the-hey-way/ - it basically explains that it shouldn't always be trying to grab your attention and distracting you. Instead as mentioned by others you could choose to set specific contacts to notify you.
Email by its nature is an asynchronous form of contact and so there should be no expectation that you reply immediately. Personally I tend to check my emails manually every hour or so when I have a break from a focussed task. Everyone is different of course so you could do more often or if you prefer I think it is possible to set always to get alerts for mails in your Imbox. But it is worth asking yourself first if you really need to know the instant someone emails you and if the value of that is worth the fact it probably causes you to slow down your efficency on what you are working on.
In case you're not a troll. - They make it a point to "name and shame" services that use tracking pixels on their site so it's actually quite important to call it out if they are doing the same.
If you are a troll, then happy trolling :)
Thanks for the good write up. The email address thing does seem like a serious flaw. In my organisation the regular newsletter-time emails come from a real person's email address, so I'd have the same problem as you. (The issue with sending to large lists isn't so much of a problem).
The domain support is important too. I can forward email into Hey - but can I respond with a different from: address besides hey.com? (In other words, can I use Hey for work even without work supporting it?)
I just keep HEY as one of my communication tools within Ferdi. Same features as the desktop app, but I can easily switch between email accounts, calendar, and Slack. Works great!
Yeah, absolutely. Although it depends what level of privacy you're looking for.
I expect there will be backdoors for gov intelligence agencies in most email services – Fastmail and HEY included.
Plus because Google is so prominent in this field, there's already a good chance a large proportion of your emails go to/from Gmail/G Suite users. So Google probably already has the 'other half' of your inbox in the sent boxes of their users.
The fact that G Suite is so popular with big businesses and corporations gives me confidence that their data policies are 'good enough'.
With regards to things like read/open tracker pixels – yes, HEY definitely has an advantage here. Gmail does go some way towards privacy by caching open tracker pixels (they did this way back in 2013!) – but it's nowhere near as private as HEY.
Anyway – I'll stop pulling things off topic! I really would like HEY to be successful. Or for Fastmail to have a proper mobile app. :-)
The alternative I'm most interested in trying is Spark.
I discovered it in this discussion in the Cortex podcast, where HEY is also mentioned. It has a few features still missing (as of April 2021) on HEY: snooze emails, reply with templates and send later.
Send Later is specially interesting to me. Sometimes I send e-mails during weekends, but I don't want to spook the receiver into thinking they ought to reply it ASAP.
Pricing is much friendlier, because Spark is not really an e-mail provider. Doesn't bother me much because at the moment, I still rely on my outlook e-mail and while I am using HEY, I'm still using STMP/forwarding with my domain provider.
Anyone who used both HEY and Spark to comment on the goods and bads of the transition?
Basecamp's Until the End of the Internet policy would let existing customers continue to use HEY even if they decided to stop development and taking new customers.
Honestly, it was annoying the first week as I had to retrain everything, but then I didn't notice any difference.
Not saying it's a great experience, but I also understand them and their philosophy. They could spend the resources to create an integrated/merge flow that would only be used once by a small subset of their userbase or spend the resources on a new feature like the recycle screener, which I am looking forward to.
Sounds like you're new to Basecamp as a company. Welcome!
They are very opinionated. They value work-life balance a lot and don't think you should be tied to work at all times or to be told when to do things. They don't do things to please the status quo. You should read their books at basecamp.com/books