Makers of Basecamp Announce Email Product 'Hey', Open Invites (hey.com) 45
Makers of productivity suite Basecamp have announced Hey, an email product they plan to release this spring. Basecamp founder and CEO, Jason Fried shared the vision for what they are calling a much-improved approach to email in an open letter today on the Hey website: You started getting stuff you didn't want from people you didn't know. You lost control over who could reach you. You were forced to inherit other people's bad communication habits. Then an avalanche of automated emails amplified the clutter. And Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, Apple, and all the others just let it happen. Now email feels like a chore, rather than a joy. Something you fall behind on. Something you clear out, not cherish. Rather than delight in it, you deal with it. Your relationship with email changed, and you didn't have a say.
So good news, the magic's still there. It's just obscured -- buried under a mess of modern day bad habits and neglect. Some from people, some from machines, a lot from email systems. It deserves a dust off. A renovation. Modernized for the way we email today. With HEY, we've done just that. It's a redo, a rethink, a simplified, potent reintroduction of email. A fresh start, the way it should be. For web, iOS, and Android. HEY is our love letter to email, and we're sending it to you. Over 12,000 people have requested early access to Hey since yesterday, said David Heinemeier Hansson, founder of Basecamp, and creator of Ruby on Rails.
So good news, the magic's still there. It's just obscured -- buried under a mess of modern day bad habits and neglect. Some from people, some from machines, a lot from email systems. It deserves a dust off. A renovation. Modernized for the way we email today. With HEY, we've done just that. It's a redo, a rethink, a simplified, potent reintroduction of email. A fresh start, the way it should be. For web, iOS, and Android. HEY is our love letter to email, and we're sending it to you. Over 12,000 people have requested early access to Hey since yesterday, said David Heinemeier Hansson, founder of Basecamp, and creator of Ruby on Rails.
Ruby on Rails (Score:4, Insightful)
We should expect what exactly? Another dysfunctional mess trying to replace e-mail?
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not sure this product is all that necessary. Most modern email clients make it pretty easy to manage the problems that the summary identifies with traditional email, but if other people find some value in havin
Re: (Score:1)
Ruby is a terrible mess. Things built with it, like Rails, even more so. Looking at you Puppet.
Re: (Score:2)
We should expect what exactly? Another dysfunctional mess trying to replace e-mail?
I hope they're not that brain dead, the chances of replacing e-mail is zero. My friends I have on Skype, Discord, Messenger, SMS, Snapchat and email so whatever works best. But at work it's entirely different tools, not even Facebook is taking over that. So what's the least common multiplier? E-mail. So whatever they're peddling is either in addition to that or putting lipstick on a pig. You'll still need to wade through your inbox from time to time to see if there's anything important you missed.
Sure.. (Score:3)
Reminds me of http://zombo.com/ [zombo.com]
Re: (Score:2)
You can do anything.
Re: (Score:2)
Anything at all
So where's the beef? (Score:2)
Does it actually do anything useful?
Re:So where's the beef? (Score:5, Funny)
Does it actually do anything useful?
Seems it collects the email addresses of folks wanting to tr it. That's a definition of "useful" to some.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
These are some of the most successful web consultants in the industry, with a history of making their own frameworks and tools, where necessary, and integrating them with everything.
There are lots of reasons to think reinventing email might not be a good idea, but "does it actually do anything useful" is not one of them in this case.
Marketing speak (Score:5, Insightful)
Every single word in their blurb is marketing speak.
"Jason Fried shared the vision"
Shared the vision? I'd rather he explained what it was going to do.
Re: (Score:2)
It's probably their version of Slack/Teams that everyone is trying to get in on. I remember similar marketing BS when Teams was coming out.
Re: (Score:2)
DHH has a history of getting millions of people to adopt his keywords, a lot of the people even started calling the Ruby programming language "Rails."
If you can't understand what they're saying... they're unlikely to be persuaded that you need to.
These people popularized "opinionated programming."
If you do want to understand them, know two things: 1) everything they said makes technical sense and most of it has probably already been implemented 2) Apply "theory of mind" while parsing what they said. Knowing
Not sure about this, but I like Jason Fried... (Score:3)
I first heard of him and basecamp in this Podcast with Dr. Peter Attia [peterattiamd.com]. The concept and how they do things at basecamp are pretty interesting. He talks specifically about email at 02:15 if you want to just jump to that.
Re: (Score:2)
NO, it's not.
It's pure marketing, unicorn hunt trash.
Re: (Score:2)
I started listening to this part. But I have the feeling that these people use email differently. I get maybe 5-6 e-mails a day. And if I don't like an email, I delete it. They talk about how their email is some sort of open invitation to add to their todo-list. But isn't that only if you allow it?
this feels like an empty ad (Score:5, Insightful)
I think they are targeting people who just throw money at things, but I'm not their audience.
Re: (Score:2)
It is like with Twitter; at first it was just the question, "What you doing right now?" It didn't turn into microblogging until they saw how people were using it.
I know you're hungry for their mature marketing speech, but you'll have to wait for that.
For now the useful questions are about what features it will have, not about how they say it makes things better.
But wtf is it? (Score:3)
Wow, that sounds appealing, like presidential-candidate-vagueness appealing. They don't say a thing about what it might be; maybe it's an email client with header cues for extra features if both sides use Hey? I'm guessing not based on the postscript:
So then perhaps it's a new protocol with an ~easy "upgrade" path from email? That would mean it suffers the very adoption issues that every other messaging solution does.
I'm worried about spam here.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Now look up DHH.
Most important piece: release date (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
OK, I'll give you the scoop.
These are famous consultants. Famous only among programmers. Mostly consultant programmers.
That must be the feedback they want at this stage.
The service will be "good" in that it will do exactly what they want it to do, well, and it will scale. What do they want it to do? They want feedback from other consultants before they create technical debt.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know whether to laugh or cry, for this is entirely too accurate.
Re: (Score:2)
Me neither, they haven't respond to my email.
To give email new life, you'd really have to... (Score:4, Interesting)
1. Guarantee privacy. This is something that Google et. al have been trying to wean the public away from-- wanting privacy. So many people simply don't think to ask for it any more. You can't do it just for those who ask for that to work. You have to do it for everyone.
2. Provide hard anonymity. One of the things that made email super useful and that we don't have any more is the ability to be reasonably anonymous. Law Enforcement or 'Public Firewall' officials world-wide have clamped down on the ability to use or reach the anonymous remailers we *used* to have. It's not just LEOs who will fight this tooth and claw, but also the 'think of the children!' types.
3. Enforce non-commercial communication at the user's request. Spam filters have gotten pretty good. Most businesses that want to contact you have to jump through hoops to get your okay. However, once you establish that one 'business' relationship, you're fair game. Buy one toilet seat on Amazon, suddenly you're deluged with 'Today's hot toilet seat deals!' and the like. You've got to dig through their website to find the 'unsubscribe me!' button, and a lot of the time it doesn't do what it says. The user needs to be able to turn commercial email on and off with a switch, and every 'rejected' email needs to get bounced back to sender at the mail exchange level.
One new webmail client or novel server configuration is unlikely to solve these problems. I do think that all of them are solvable, though, even though they'll require a great deal of re-architecting email.
Unfortunately, unless you can somehow invent a magic bullet that will keep world governments, law enforcement, and marketing types from ever being able to touch such a service, it won't stay usable long.
Re: (Score:2)
Email should be smarter. What's important, what's not? Alternatively: What do I need to respond to right away, what can wait?
We've only been using spam/not_spam automated (with training) categorization - the technology can be harnessed for other uses.
Re: (Score:2)
"Hard anonymity" = spammers and other criminals
If you have a use for being anonymous, why would I want to receive that email?
You're using a lot of misdirection there. Modern email is protected by end to end encryption, it can't be snooped. So you are anonymous from the perspective of the network.
There is a big difference between privacy, where you only share what you want to share, with who you choose, and anonymity, where I have to receive your message if I wanted it or not, and without any way to know who
Re: (Score:2)
Modern email is protected by end to end encryption
Where?
SMTP between mail servers *might* be encrypted under TLS, and SMTP/IMAP between client and server is probably protected by TLS. But the message is received in the clear at each hop. There is no end-to-end encryption.
Lotus Notes defaulted to signing and encrypting messages within an organisation, but even it has to fall back to cleartext messages once it wants to send to anyone else. And everyone loves to hate Notes.
PGP provides the ability to do end-to-end encryption, but no-one cares about PGP today.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, you're right, I shouldn't have said "end to end" in that sentence, I should have said "everything that goes over the wire is encrypted," and it can't be snooped by third parties unless they hack your mail server or the recipient's mail server.
Lotus Notes? LOL No, nobody hates that, because it isn't a thing.
Re: (Score:1)
Basecamp? (Score:1)
Isn't that Garmin's mapping program?
Hey (Score:3)
is for horses
Google Wave, anyone? (Score:2)
Google Wave was supposed to fix the problems of email. But it failed to catch on because it didn't integrate existing email. People want better email, but a Whole New Thing is a barrier to entry, especially when it's not an open standard.
Why do marketing people write such demented prose? (Score:1)
"It’s reliable. It’s simple." (Score:3)
Anybody who runs an email server knows this is false.
The reason why GMail, Outlook, Yahoo, etc. are so popular is because they're the 800lb gorillas in the room. If Google decides to throttle your email because they think you're sending too much mail, there's nothing you can do about it. And the people who use your email server start complaining, saying that it takes forever for their emails to reach their sister's gmail address. AOL decides your server is infected with Russian Collusion virus and puts you on email death row until some intern manually flushes your IP address.
Even trying to run a very simple email list of a few dozen people is a forever treadwheel of scanning blacklists and searching for the non-standard error that Yahoo sends you to let you know that they don't accept email that fails to include kitten pictures.
And let's not forget the seventeen daemons you have to run to scan for spam, viruses, brute forcing and all the rest so your mail server doesn't get Internet AIDS. Simple, my ass.
I don't think the Basecamp guys are going to fix email. It sounds like they're trying to do for the email client what they did for project management, but the problems with email don't lie with the client. You can teach a fourth grader to check email with mutt in half an hour. The problem with email is the massive amount of centralization of an inherently decentralized protocol. Everybody was so happy that Google fixed their spam problem by scanning everything at scale that they never noticed they lost their freedom and autonomy. We never addressed the spam problem head on, we just swept it under the rug. Now everybody communicates via Facebook, WhatsApp, SMS, etc. because there's a pretty decent chance that your email will not arrive in a reasonable amount of time.
While I'm in old man mode, I'd like to include a massive "fuck you" to the first jackhole who thought HTML emails were a great idea, and all of Microsoft for inflicting Outlook (Express and otherwise) on the world.
Re: (Score:2)
"The reason why GMail, Outlook, Yahoo, etc. are so popular is because they're the 800lb gorillas in the room."
Hrm. For me it was:
1) pretty fantastic spam killing
2) access from literally anywhere/any machine (a mountain in Peru where they had dial-up but no fridges)
3) works with every device and email client I've ever used
4) pulls mail from other servers
Hotmail's spam filtering sucked. I've seen no reason to switch since then. I don't care what size the company is, just the offering itself.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think it's false. To have a reliable mail server, and your server is just a small part of the whole system, you have to play along with the anti-spam rules like: never ever relay mail for other domains; have a reverse lookup for your server's public IP to its FQDN; have your server's FQDN in its SMTP greeting line; have a valid SPF list that's set to at least "Soft Fails". That's a pretty simple list and it's all you need. DKIM and DMARC are "nice to haves" - at least I've never needed to configure them for anybody. The trick is configuring black lists, white lists and greylisting on your server for incoming mail, along with something like SpamAssassin, to block 95% of your incoming SPAM/UCE. And, honestly, you can achieve most of that by blocking CIDR blocks from Russia and China. RBL and a few well-placed custom rules in SpamAssassin take care of the next 4.9% of SPAM/UCE. I can live with two or three spams in my inbox per day, spread across a couple of dozen mailbox accounts.
Yes, that sounds super simple and super reliable.
Remember the old "Your suggestion to fix spam won't work for these reasons (choose all that apply)" jokes? The can was kicked down the road for so long that Google took a stab at fixing the problem on their own. Now, if Google decides that all email has to be in ALL CAPS, every MTA will be forced to comply because the cost of not routing to gmail addresses is too high.
Your idea of blocking entire countries is interesting. Unfortunately, as shown by the blowba
Re: (Score:2)
Anybody who runs an email server knows this is false.
In the Olden Times, running an email server required a PhD in Sendmail, or so the story went. For me, those were the glory days. (Because I know how to set my editor to display unprintable characters, not because I have any degrees)
Them IBM released postfix and saved the world. For a few years.
Now email is a flying unicorn spewing "rainbows" across the sky, and there is no PhD available in Sherbert Umbrella Deployment.(1)
(1) Note for false pedants and grammaticasters: https://www.merriam-webster.co... [merriam-webster.com]
Let's talk about me and my needs ... (Score:2)
... wherein, ever since I retired, email doesn't do much for me.
I get Amazon confirmations, Apple login on new device notifications, and UPS tells me that I have a package, which was conveyed several minutes prior via text message.
Not making this up: I have a very large extended family, ages ranging from pre-teen to just hanging on and none of them use email for social media.
It's a solution to the ubiquitous problem that no one I know is interested in solving.
Unlikely (Score:1)
Their website does not even render the slightest bit without JavaScript enabled. I have my doubt that they will bring the simple joys of glorious non-HTML-infested-email back.