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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.
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Makers of Basecamp Announce Email Product 'Hey', Open Invites

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  • Ruby on Rails (Score:4, Insightful)

    by bluefoxlucid ( 723572 ) on Friday February 07, 2020 @12:44PM (#59701990) Homepage Journal

    We should expect what exactly? Another dysfunctional mess trying to replace e-mail?

    • I'm not really a fan of the Ruby language so I never was terribly into Rails, but some people apparently like both and I've used what I consider to be good software that was built using both. Maybe it's all a dysfunctional mess under the hood, but that doesn't bother me from a user perspective.

      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
      • by Anonymous Coward

        Ruby is a terrible mess. Things built with it, like Rails, even more so. Looking at you Puppet.

    • by Kjella ( 173770 )

      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.

  • by kwelch007 ( 197081 ) on Friday February 07, 2020 @12:49PM (#59702008) Homepage

    Reminds me of http://zombo.com/ [zombo.com]

  • Does it actually do anything useful?

    • by BeerFartMoron ( 624900 ) on Friday February 07, 2020 @01:02PM (#59702064)

      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.

    • Yeah, I thought it was an implementation of the "Bro" app from Silicon Valley until I remembered that was a parody of a real-world app.
    • 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)

    by ardmhacha ( 192482 ) on Friday February 07, 2020 @12:59PM (#59702054)

    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.

    • by dysmal ( 3361085 )

      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.

    • 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

  • by gosand ( 234100 ) on Friday February 07, 2020 @01:01PM (#59702062)

    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.

    • NO, it's not.
      It's pure marketing, unicorn hunt trash.

    • 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?

  • by Micah NC ( 5616634 ) on Friday February 07, 2020 @01:03PM (#59702068)
    How does it make things better? The summary doesn't say.

    I think they are targeting people who just throw money at things, but I'm not their audience.
    • 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.

  • by Khopesh ( 112447 ) on Friday February 07, 2020 @01:12PM (#59702100) Homepage Journal

    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:

    P.S. We’ll only use your email address to send an invite to HEY, not for future marketing, sales, or anything like that. We’ll never sell or trade your name or email. In fact, the list will be destroyed once everyone on the list has been invited.

    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.

    • by Jaime2 ( 824950 )
      It's probably someone doing exactly what Microsoft Office 365 and Gmail are doing. Only those people are clowns that don't know what you want and these people are going to get it right by sheer force of will.
  • This article summary missed the most important piece from the site in my opinion: "Coming April 2020." The makers of this new email service will be sending out invites soon to anyone who sends them an email, and are trying to collect stories of what users think is good and bad about email. It is difficult to determine how good this new service might be with the limited summary of how they plan to modernize email.
    • 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.

  • by Bonker ( 243350 ) on Friday February 07, 2020 @01:24PM (#59702152)

    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.

    • 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.

    • "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

      • 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.

        • 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.

    • I believe hard anonymity is the thing that destroys email for me. Everybody can email me with a personalised email claiming to be a Nigerian prince, my girlfriend who needs money, the perfect solution for penis enlargement, or my bank. It would help me a lot if I only got emails that were sent by verified identified people who really took effort to get in touch with me personally.
  • Isn't that Garmin's mapping program?

  • by lactose99 ( 71132 ) on Friday February 07, 2020 @01:57PM (#59702286)

    is for horses

  • 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.

  • ...and does anyone have a regular expression to filter it out?
  • by rho ( 6063 ) on Friday February 07, 2020 @04:41PM (#59702854) Journal

    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.

    • "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.

    • 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]

  • ... 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.

  • 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.

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