Nah I think that’s fair, it definitely seems like the main feature people have talked about when I’ve heard about it, hense why everyone’s saying it’s replicable in Gmail.
1 Like
I’m exploring Hey now. One of the things it says is:
In HEY, every one of your contacts - that’s every person, service, newsletter, whatever - gets a Contact Page . That Contact Page lists recent files they sent you, and every thread you’re both on.
If you can tell me how to achieve this with Outlook, I’d be all ears.
(Also my experience with the ‘Focused Inbox’ in Outlook is that it’s an abomination; it’s entirely obstuse to me why one email might end up in there and another email in the ‘other’ when it’s actually the other email I want to see. I end up missing or being late to things because I forget to check the non-focused email box, while Hey’s big shiny ‘screening’ button would appear to be a lot more obvious in guiding you to deal with (the initial cases) of such ‘other’ emails.)
2 Likes
We can put it down to a sweeping statement because there was a lack of research then 
I don’t think any of the other features are big enough or good enough to justify a change of email address and a bit of cash though personally. They’re definitely selling it on the ‘imbox’ and the screening stuff, and this is the stuff that’s not difficult to replicate with gmail, at minimum you can do the screening, what’s new, what you’ve seen before, the paper trail, the “do it later queue” and the feed in gmail.
I agree the contacts and the file manager stuff seem useful and I definitely would use it if it was a part of my current email account, but I’m not about to change my email address for it.
2 Likes
Can’t agree with you more. That feature is terrible for my work email where I don’t end up creating accounts with websites for various things. It doesn’t even work out that emails from people within the same domain should be in the Focus box.
The one thing that drastically improved my work account though was adding a filter for the word “unsubscribe” to go straight to a out of the way folder.
Sadly I can’t apply the same principles to my personal email, because I’m not only not monitoring it as frequently, but I also sometimes need(/want) to read emails from those services. So Hey does appeal.
I’m keen to see where it goes. If nothing else, having a clean break is sometimes useful. Looking at my emails right now, I have 653 unread. 
Outlook on the web gives you a contact page if you click on a sender’s profile picture (even if autogenerated from their initials). It gives you an overview of all the recent e-mails between you two as well as any files.
I agree that focused inbox is terrible for the aforementioned reasons, but I am not confident in Hey’s implementation to be any better. How does it tell whether to show or hide an e-mail after you classify the first one? Does it just match by sender/subject (a glorified “create rule” button then), or does it try to do some “magic” in which case it’ll have the same failure modes as Focused Inbox and similar solutions?
I’ve just sent them an email querying their taxation policy.
I’ve pointed out to them that the UK has left the EU and we should have now have the same pricing as Norway or Switzerland.
I’ll let you know what they say. Hopefully you can get your tax back if they realise that Jan 31st actually happened.
2 Likes
We haven’t left the EU until the end of the year…
No. The UK left the EU on January 31st 2020.
2 Likes
Nice detailed response to my VAT query…
Glad they cleared that up then…
Also, I get the feeling they might not be fully clued up with their policies…
The Norwegian Tax Administration state:-
Private individuals in Norway who are not businesses must pay VAT when they purchase electronic services from abroad (e-VAT). The entity providing the electronic services is responsible for calculating and paying Norwegian VAT.
Yet Hey dont charge for Norwegian customers? Where’s the consistency?
Did you go through the process of signing up for a trial, using a VPN then trying to pay for it to find that out, or is there a list they have somewhere?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but although the UK has left the EU, aren’t we still in a transition state? Meaning that until new rules have been put into place, we’re still operating with EU rules for such things as this?
1 Like
When you go to pay, there’s a drop down for the different countries. If you select a taxable country it says $99 + taxes, for Norway it’s just $99.
There’s also a list here
1 Like
Quite possibly, which is one of the reasons why I queried this with Hey.
The list they have though does just refer to the members of the EU and a few US states, there’s no mention of any charges for other countries
1 Like
I think for those unsure the best way to get a genuine sense of the product is this tour from Jason the Basecamp CEO
1 Like
We are in Transition so VAT rules are still the same until we finally leave End Dec 2020
1 Like
Out of interest, do they treat firstname.lastname the same as firstnamelastname (i.e. dots ignored, as with Gmail) or are they two separate addresses?
As of last week they do!
Do treat the same, or treat differently?
Just tried a test and putting a dot in the middle doesn’t seem to work for me
1 Like
From what I recall, I think they said if you ‘own’ “first.last”, they wont sell other variations with/without dots, but they won’t act as aliases. (i.e. so firstlast@ won’t got to first.last@)
I just tried it on a variation of mine and nada.
1 Like