I’m finishing my two-week trial of Basecamp’s new email platform Hey.

I’ve used Basecamp with my legal team for several years and it works great for internal communication, project management, and other collaborative aspects of our work.

So of course I needed to try Hey.[^1]

A platform, not a client

Basecamp classifies Hey as an email “platform,” rather than an email client. Hey is available via web browser, and apps for Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android.

Email by any name …

Not surprisingly, Hey the email app works a lot like the Hey feature on Basecamp. New messages land in your “Imbox” (like “New for You” in Basecamp). After you read them, they fall down to your “Previously Seen” list. You don’t need to archive or delete messages, they just flow down your list.

Problem, meet solution?

I’m a “Inbox 0” kind-of-person. I use a GTD-style method to process email, identifying next actions and capturing them in my OmniFocus task manager.

Up until recently, Gmail has worked pretty well for this. It’s easy to delete batches of emails by ticking them off from the inbox. I can copy URLs into my task manager. Given the generous storage limits, I can liberally archive messages for reference.

Like many, my problem is how much time I have to spend to manage an increasing volume of mail. I get a fair amount of newsletters and marketing materials. I have unsubscribed from the stuff I’m truly not interested in. I still get newsletters with occasionally useful information (e.g. new class offerings, school announcements, etc), which I need to manage. I’m getting a huge amount of political fundraising emails. I get digests from the Washington Post, The New York Times, NextDoor, LinkedIn, and a few others. This stuff really adds up and draws on my time.

If I take about twenty minutes a day, I can readily process this volume of email. The problem arises when I miss a day or two. Then I’m looking at hundreds of emails to process. I’ll need to devote a significant block of time to what is certainly not deep work.

Hey, the solution?

Hey’s idea is to filter the stream of email according to user preferences, rather than with an algorithm. Here’s how the process works:

You start by screening and approving all first-time senders. This first pass will spare you true spam and unwanted solicitations. You can change your mind about senders later, which is nice. Somewhat ambivalently, I screened out all those political fundraising emails.

For approved senders, you then designate which of three places the emails should land:

"The Imbox” — for actual people and any emails you don’t want to miss.
The Feed — for newsletters, digests, and marketing emails you might want to read. The messages are presented in a continuous scroll, newsfeed style. You can click on content and read it in place.[^2]
The Paper Trail — for transactional emails, like order confirmations and receipts.

For me, there is an unfortunate grey area between The Feed and The Paper Trail. Where do you put all the marketing emails that are mostly promotional in nature? My feeling is those don’t belong in The Feed because they aren’t informational and unlikely to be “read” in any normal sense of the word. On the other hand, these don’t relate to any transactions, so they don’t belong in the Paper Trail either. I realize adding yet a fourth “place” would add too much complexity to the system. I just may need to adjust my conception about what should be in a newsfeed.[^3]

Other notable features

Here’s some other useful features:

Reply Later — Move messages to a separate pile, where you can find them when ready to draft a reply
Set Aside — Set aside messages for quick reference (so they don’t get buried)
Block trackers — Hey has a built-in spy blocker for privacy (and isn’t harvesting your emails for personal information)
Controls for group threads and rewriting subject lines
Bundling email from particular senders
Large file sharing
Ability to clip content and add notes to messages

Here’s a rundown of twenty key features. Basecamp cofounder Jason Fried has a product demonstration.

But the price, the price!

Many will balk at the $99 annual cost. Obviously, this seems expensive compared to free services like Gmail and Yahoo mail, or the cheap mailboxes offered by internet service providers or purchased through domain service providers.

But is Hey expensive compared to analogous services and apps? Website hosting costs about the same. Apple’s 2TB iCloud storage plan costs slightly more. An Apple Music family subscription costs significantly more. Quality app subscriptions are usually somewhere in the double digits (e.g. Evernote, MindNode, Ulysses, OmniFocus, etc). Depending on where you live, you might pay this monthly for good broadband internet service.

So, if email is going well for you, this will feel like too much to pay. But if Hey solves some of your email problems, the price seems right.

Pros and cons and final thoughts

Pros:

Well designed and easy to use
Supports a realistic email workflow
Permanent URLs for linking emails (like to notes in a task manager)
More private and helps protect personal information
Established and trustworthy developer

Cons:

No way (yet) to use custom domains
Ambiguity between The Feed versus The Paper Trail
No share button in iOS
Cost

I’ve bought a one-year subscription. I’m currently forwarding email from my Gmail account and have begun to (still hesitantly) reply from and compose new emails from Hey.

So how is it going for me?

This week, I noticed I’m spending about half my usual time managing email, and that includes me fiddling around with features and experimenting with workflows. Spending too much time managing my email was the problem, and Hey may indeed be the solution.

What are your email pain points? Have you tried Hey or any other alternatives?

Because Basecamp works so well, my work email is under control. I’m only considering Hey for my personal email.
Unfortunately, since the thread is in reverse chronological order (newest on top), it’s hard to know when you’ve finished reading your feed, besides realizing that something looks familiar. There’s no way I can find to track where you left off. If reading your feed is purely optional, that seems fine. But it doesn’t work as well for people, like me, who might want to know when they’ve reviewed everything.
Hey also has a label feature. So I have a Read-Review label I apply to those emails that need to be read later, because of their length, importance, or other reasons. I can easily come back to these in a separate reading session.

Hey: My Review Of Basecamp’s New Email Platform