I have been using HEY for a week now, here's a thread with my first impressions 👇
If you don't know anything about HEY, you should check out the features tour. It is a great overview that highlights many of their unique features. https://hey.com/features/the-screener
When I started using it, it was a bit uncomfortable. No notifications by default? I won't see all emails in my "Inbox"?, etc. But after the first couple of days, I realized the discomfort came from FOMO and bad habits. It's great now. JOMO, Joy Of Missing Out.
Something I see differently now is the destination assigned to senders (Imbox, Feed & Paper Trail). Maybe you want something in the Paper Trail but still want to know when it arrives. You can assign it to the Imbox and move it after reading. Which is easy with keyboard shortcuts.
Keyboard shortcuts are awesome. I'm surprised they don't mention it in the features tour, maybe it's only appealing to geeks like me. But you can do almost everything with keyboard shortcuts that are easy to use and memorable.
HEY also shipped with a Linux client from day one, and that's what I've been using. There is a client for each platform. https://hey.com/apps
It is definitely a solid v1. I stopped using my previous email clients (Thunderbird & K-9 Mail) and I am not missing them. Still, there is a couple of features I am missing. They are coming.
Custom domains for individuals? https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1273725369489727490
IMAP is probably the only qualm I have about it so far. I understand it doesn't make sense for the HEY client, but it'd be nice to manage my email from other clients. And that's not going to happen. https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1272599759686000640
Still, if there is a company I can trust with vendor lock-in, that's Basecamp. And I don't say this lightly. If worse comes to worse, their policies on what happens after cancelling the account are good. https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1275503946962857984
In summary, my experience has been really good so far. To be fair though, I was already doing fine with my previous setup. Even though this is a big improvement, I feel it's only noticeable for power users. I get ~5 emails a day, so email has never been overwhelming for me.
But something important for everyone, not only power users, is who your email provider is. I share a lot of values with Basecamp, and that comes through in the product. I didn't with Google, and that's why I ended up using 3rd party clients.
Starting today, you can reach me at noeldemartin@hey.com. I'm so glad to finally ditch gmail and become a Basecamp customer!
Being email such a critical service and Basecamp a relatively small company, you may wonder how reliable it is. I cannot say that the application was unresponsive or slow at any point. And it's not that they don't have traffic. https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1275511173782204416