Hope everyone had a nice holiday season. We hope 2022 is off to a good start for you.
We're back to announce two new features that we just added to HEY:
An Away Autoresponder that sends an automated response if you're out of the office or away for a while.
A simple way to share an email with someone else via simple sharable links.
Let's take look at both features.
— Away Autoresponder Up in your Avatar menu you'll see a new option called "Away Autoresponder".
Clicking that will take you to a screen that'll list every account you have on HEY, an on/off toggle for each account, and some autoresponder text which you can modify. Turning a responder on will automatically reply to the sender with the message you choose. You can also opt to only send the auto response to contacts you've already screened in, or anyone that hits the Screener. If you have an autoresponder on, you'll see a block at the top of your Imbox reminding you it's on and active.
The bottom of the Autoresponders setup screen in HEY includes some additional FAQs you'll want to review before turning it on. We're sorry we couldn't get this out to you prior to the holidays when you likely took some time off, but now you'll have it for the next time you need it.
— Sharable Links Historically, if you wanted to show someone an email, you had to forward it to them. That forwarded copy of the email is often poorly formatted, routinely deeply indented, and a general mess. And it also spawns a new thread, separate from the original. It feels like a lot of overhead just to say "hey, check out this email."
Now, on HEY for Domains, our multi-user version, we offer easy Thread Sharing inside an account. But what if you aren't on a shared account? Or the other person you want to share the email with is on Gmail or Outlook or some other system? Or you just want to quickly ping someone a link to check out an email thread via iMessage,. Signal, WhatsApp, or whatever? Why is this so hard with email!? It really shouldn't be.
That's why we built Sharable Links into HEY. Now you can just grab a link and share that link with anyone. They'll see the whole thread, and any future emails/replies sent to that thread, all on a single page. They can't respond or join the thread, but they can see it.
To grab a link for an email, just go to the email, click the ••• More button at the bottom, and select "Share this thread." You'll then get a sharable link, just like you might with Dropbox, iCloud, or a similar tool.
If you don't want the link to work anymore, just select the same option in the menu and you'll see a button to turn off the link. You can also click the "Turn off" link that shows up under the subject of an email with a sharable link.
— We hope you find these two new features useful.
Next week we're getting started on the next batch of improvements. We're looking forwarding to announcing those when they're done.
