Using HEY for Email
Last week I posted my First impressions of HEY email. Today, I paid the $99 for the next year, so I guess the pros beat the cons.
Sometimes it’s best to just let things go. For example, the idea of “Inbox Zero”. I’ve come to think of Inbox Zero as yet another thing to punish myself about when I fail to achieve it. I don’t need more ways to feel bad about myself. HEY does a good job of making me not care. No unread icons, no notifications by default. Just a list of new emails that fall down into a list of “previously seen” messages once I’ve read them. No rush.
That “previously seen” list represents something else I need to let go of… archiving. It’s taken a few days, but I’m learning to not worry about archiving messages. They just drop out of sight. If I don’t want to lose track of a particular message, I just “set it aside” and it sticks. Or I can put it into the “Reply Later” collection.
Email clients are really just fancy file managers.
I’ve seen many reactions to HEY that claim “HEY is just a bunch of fancy filters, I can easily recreate the experience in Gmail.” While that’s true, sort of, HEY is more than a few clever filters. It’s the less obvious features of HEY, and, along with the general workflow, that are worth such a disruptive change for me. A few examples…
Renaming threads. The ability to change the subject of incoming emails is terrific. Message lists now read like a collection of notes I’ve taken rather than a list of whatever every individual sender blurted out. I now rename half of the messages I receive. I hadn’t realized how many emails I get with hard-to-parse subjects. Now I can fix them, and everyone else still sees the original subject, so this doesn’t confuse anyone.
Merging threads. This is great. I no longer need to manage multiple related threads. I merge them so replies to any of the messages in any thread end up in my merged thread. Everything behaves normally for everyone else, though. Handy.
Bundling senders. There are some senders from which I receive lots of messages. Things like Gitlab, Basecamp, etc. Now I “bundle” those senders and no matter how many messages I get, they only take up one one line in my Imbox (still don’t like “Imbox” but ¯_(ツ)_/¯).
Sticky Notes and Notes to Self. This is huge for me. I often want to add a quick note about an email, so what I used to do was link or copy the message into whatever note-taking tool I’m using and write the notes there. Now, I do it right in the email thread. Before HEY, I only did this with emails that really needed notes, but now I do it all the time because it’s so easy. This is also much better than creating a bunch of draft replies around for keeping notes.
I don’t like that HEY is its own thing and not a “real” email service. And it remains to be seen how well this works once I get a lot of history in there; I’m used to the fancy searching features in Mu4e or MailMate. I can export an mbox file any time and have all my messages local for searching with whatever, so that might work if needed.
I may not be able to fly through my inbox like I used to; tagging and filing and flagging and building new smart mailboxes. On the other hand, HEY makes it so I don’t have to.