Hey.com is a nice rethinking of traditional email. I'm impressed in many ways, but the service is rough around the edges. Here are my top five concerns:
- There is no "undo send" functionality, something I find very valuable in Gmail.
- This works by having a time delay between pressing send and actually sending.
- Screening in/out based only on email address is too blunt.
- Not all senders use different email addresses for newsletters and actionable messages.
- See the articles below for more context.
- A lack of important navigation shortcuts while reading messages:
- At the minimum, I want to have forward and back.
- I would also like to have 'mark as unread'.
- There are bugs around keyboard shortcuts.
- For example, "?" does not work well in Safari on macOS.
- A lack of detailed search features. For example:
- search by date,
- unreplied messages for X days, and
- boolean operators.
I recently became a paying Hey customer, even though it felt risky to put my money behind an obviously incomplete product. Still, I'm hopeful Basecamp (the company) will continue to improve Hey (the service). Email can (and should) be dramatically improved. Hey is a positive step in that direction. I encourage other companies to innovate and provide additional options.
As far as Hey is concerned, to keep me satisfied as a customer beyond the first year, I'm looking for a
- bug-free, (#3, #4)
- capable, (#1, #5)
- and convenient service. (#2)
I hope others will write to Hey directly. Share your concerns. So far, the support team has been responsive. I'm hopeful they will listen and triage priorities accordingly.