Quote:
Originally Posted by TenFour
From a distance not having tried Hey it appears to me that you need to use their way of processing messages/information, not your own way. Maybe their way of doing things will work for you, but it seems like you are going to be stuck with what someone else decides is best for you.
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Yeah, that's close to what I initially thought the first time I trialed it, although from the beginning I did like some of the features, despite some of the concerns I had.
However, the second time through, my opinion really started changing after I gave it a good solid trial... I actually didn't feel locked in to use "their way" as much as I thought I would, but rather it dawned on me that I had become lost over the years, and sort of locked in to my own unhealthy way I had been dealing with email up to this point. It was a strange epiphany to have over something I had been doing for so many years. YMMV of course and it may have no appeal to many people. Definitely a niche email service.
And don't get me wrong, there are things about it that need refinement, and it needs a few more key features that I'd like to see that many of us take for granted these days, and it really is a very "opinionated" approach to email that some people will simply not like at all.
However, in my case, I started seeing how the concepts would actually save me time, reduce distraction, help me focus, help reorganize how I process email, help me better manage and combine and annotate conversations, track attachments much better, think of email in terms of people as opposed to threads, reduce messy workarounds I've been doing for years, reframe how I consume lower-priority email newsletters/subscriptions (like with blogs, serial content), etc., etc.
And while HEY does tend to "escort" you into their world the way they see it, it is still flexible. Not nearly as flexible as something like FastMail though, of course... FastMail can be very powerful and very tweakable, and if someone values far more granular control, then HEY will be a hard sell. In fact, I fell into this category. But with more experimentation on real-world conversations with real people, in some ways I found HEY to be more flexible and powerful than I initially thought. But not in a granular way... in a "workflowy way." It's not just one feature that does this though... it's really a combination of features that help workflows and organizing threads/content more naturally/organically... at least more like the way my own desk is organized. Hard to explain how all these little features actually combine to help me rethink my process... but that's what happened with me.
So they are worth a 1-year extended "trial" on one of my domains, and I'll be happy to pay the $99 to see how it goes.
Worst case, I can take some of these ideas and implement some version of them right in FastMail, for example, just by rethinking how I use filters, labels, folders, etc.... One can basically implement many of these workflow ideas without ever using HEY. But it's the way they combine features and structure the service to influence the user to rethink how they use email that makes it potentially special, and worth it for me to spend more time with it. But again, if someone wants/needs very specific granular control, then HEY is not the right service for them, and likely never will be.