Show HN: Automatically Rename HEY's 'Imbox' to 'Inbox'(chrome.google.com) |
Show HN: Automatically Rename HEY's 'Imbox' to 'Inbox'(chrome.google.com) |
All their branding, personal and professional, is a decade old.
I'm sure the tech teams at Shopify and Sephora, both of which regularly do 50k+ requests per second, or maybe Airbnb, Github or Hulu will be super eager to hear your opinions about how Rails is slow and can't scale.
To each their own, sure, but yikes there are so many more things in the world to be annoyed by right now.
I imagine with the Apple situation they are working on adding support currently however, even if it’s reduced. They need an iOS plan B.
I hope they don't. Apple needs to feel the pain their evil and immoral behaviour is inflicting on the world.
In a perfect world, the government would force them to behave ethically. Absent that, Hey's stance here is the next best thing.
If folks like Basecamp don't start standing up to Apple, then nothing stops Apple from just outright killing the majority of mobile software development. And while it's not directly their fault, at some point iPhone users need to recognize that their purchase of an iPhone is directly funding the destruction of the innovative / creative software they claim to want to have.
If you like Hey, maybe stop buying a phone that's trying to murder Hey. If you run a company like Hey, maybe stop giving in to the mafia's extortion demands.
That's true, but I would argue, perhaps somewhat conservatively, that email is an area where we don't want or need much innovation. Email works fine and has for decades. In many cases, "innovation" (except at the protocol level) has made things worse.
I've seen a bunch of "new takes" on email over the years, but none of them have been interesting to me because I don't want to run my mail on something goofy and proprietary that I can't easily and (mostly) painlessly migrate somewhere else.
Also, I'm not sure email needs a "new take."
For example, a standardized method that allows you to tell your email server to send an email at a specific time.
Exactly. That's why I'd like to use their app as an IMAP client to retrieve emails from my gmail account. Not the other way around.
I think imbox is embarrassing, and I don’t like the graphic design, but it’s definitely innovative and good for them for doing something different.
Impbox and Imbox.
But that is an awful name that sounds like a toddler not getting their consonants right.
Things like that are good filters to find you user base and focus your resources.
edit: typo :D
With new products, humans need an anchor to familiar features in order to feel comfortable.
What Makes Things Cool https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/01/what-ma...
But I still think it's a cool product and luckily I won't have to hear Jason Fried talk while using it.
I also noticed the "Imbox" but i dont believe i thought about it for more than 1 second.
When I see a typo, I instinctively go back and re-read the word or sentence to make sure I didn't misread something.
The last thing I want in my e-mail client is additional mental overhead. It's a minor detail, but it's also unnecessary, subtracts more than it adds, and it's easy to fix.
This entire discussion thread exists because of that one little thing. In other words, it adds marketing value. Getting people to discuss your product, even if negative, is still free marketing.
Because I dont see lots of Hey from marketing side, I do see lots of hey on the argument against Apple App Store.
Hey is a mailbox app that costs $99/year, doesn’t support IMAP (edit: or POP), and with a UI straight out of 2007. This app would never be getting this kind of attention otherwise. It’s brilliant marketing and is exactly the type of thing they talk about in their book.
I've got my own domain hosted on google apps, and it just works. Rarely get spam, I'm used to the UI, I don't want to change my email address because I don't need to.
Having said the above, I guess I am not the target audience for this.
"If you have to set up a domain to point to your help pages to explain why something isn't a typo, you're doing it wrong".
It gets people talking, just normal marketing. It's not like people can't use it without understanding why it says Imbox.
Founders: Thanks
Users of Hey/Basecamp: You have a typo
Founders: No, this isn't a typo. And we built a website to show you're wrong: http://itsnotatypo.com
I think they should create a way to rename the Imbox though, so that when people get it, they don't have to look at the weird "typo" anymore.
I think it's genius.
The Basecamp folks are opinionated and strong-willed, so I'm not sure that they will back down on the unfortunately named "imbox," but I hope they do. Fortunately this isn't as colossal of a mistake as the no-delete-gmail mistake, and in the end, it's not a huge deal (q.v., the name of the iPad was a big deal to some when it came out) but they clearly were too clever for their own good here.
Doesn't seem very fair. I thought at this point hacker news' spam detectors would flare up and stop bumping everything 'Hey' to the top.
Not trying to put on a tinfoil hat but, there is simply no way in hell to get this level of PR and attention unless a significant portion of all Hey activities have been carefully and methodically planned for weeks and months.
I deal with the same difficulties myself and the App store mafia cut is a real problem but I just don't think I'll ever be able to trust them again with such aggressive PR tactics.
I love rails so I was hoping this would be awesome but between the invite-only sign up and seeing some of the impractical design decisions they have implemented, I don't think I will be using it, at least not any time soon.
I really want someone to develop a "better email" for the general populace that would be intuitive and offer chat-app-inspired improvements that could really supplant email but seeing what I have this service really seems like something geared toward techies.
Edit: actually, it turns out I'm just an idiot and shouldn't comment on things before I fully wake up. That's my b.
https://twitter.com/manuel_frigerio/status/12739352538879098...
Which would be a reasonably line of thought, were hey not an e-mail service.
Nothing much succeeds in actually changing the way it works.
What does work is developing communication systems unrelated to email ie slack.
My prediction is that Hey will fail but will pivot into something else which the developers will take as a victory.
Perhaps they plan to introduce custom domains in future? Maybe this just didn't fit into the initial release?
Most probably.
This is how basecamp always did thing, even back when it was called 37signals: they release a MVP, they generate money as early as they can, then they start agile feedback loop, improving the product throught many iterations.
They were one of the teams that made agile popular after all.
They also promote the philosophy of rejecting features and not noting the requests for them down.
Only a feature that has been requested and rejected enough times pass their "filter" of something that should be added to the product.
I'm betting a custom domain name will pass such filter and end up being implemented in one year or two.
No feature is worth the hassle of getting everyone to update my email address.
I’ve been using it for about 3 days so far.
The product is pretty great regardless of the funny spelling, they are launching a business version in a few months to allow you to bring your own custom domains. The notable twists I’ve seen so far is the inbox filtering logic that allows you to blatantly say “I don’t want emails from this address ever.” Gmail’s “mark spam” stuff doesn’t quite work for this and stuff eventually gets unmarked. It’s like the worlds easiest unsubscribe with no run around with unsubscribe dark patterns. The privacy stuff looks pretty good too. It seems to me that the iOS app is unbelievably fast (ironic considering...) like time to go from closed app to “see new emails” is easily A few seconds faster than both Gmail and Outlook. I’m tempted to pay to be honest. I’ve been really happy. But then there’s the whole “will I ever get an updated iOS app?” Thing that puts water on that.
Edit: why am I being downvoted? The Head of the House Antitrust Commission directly called Apple’s behavior out and the EU announced Investigations of Apple’s behavior. The rest is just my option of a product. Lol
Apple is not doing anything illegal (future regulations might change that), nor anything horrible.
There might be conflicts of interest between App Store and likes of Apple Music and Spotify having to pay IAP fees, but there's nothing wrong with 15-30% distributor fee to access a unified market of 155 countries where all the headache of payments, local sales taxes, APIs, etc are taken care of.
People forget the 2000s with Windows Mobile, CAB files and xda-developers, and the 50% shops take to get your software/game distributed and on a shelf in front of customers.
In a perfect world there is a good enough iPhone competitor that would force Apple to behave better because otherwise companies wouldn't build apps on their platform.
For Hey alone, agreed. I don't think they have enough clout.
But Hey is a cool/popular new thing. If the next 20 coolest newest things also skip Apple as well (because Apple continues this grossly unethical behaviour) then Apple iPhones might lose their largely-unearned reputation as the place where the coolest/most-polished apps live.
It doesn't necessarily have to be a huge multinational corporate stance to make this painful. It just has to be enough of the trendiest new things people want.
Hey was extremely hyped up before the whole drama. That is why they had tens of thousands on waiting list before the whole thing. This isn't Free Web Mail, people are paying to use it. And if there wasn't any demand, invite code wouldn't have cost $500 dollars on eBay before Apple rejected their App.
>The drama with Apple is absolutely,.......
I cant see how they could have orchestra the whole thing when they have went out to make sure everything in their App was complying with the rules. And hence that was how 1.0 got put on App Store in the first place.
I do.
The fact they don't support the widely supported IMAP means no easy way to move away.
This is vendor lock-in to their walled-garden. This approach should be killed, dead, before it ever makes it to the end user.
As for IMAP with more JSON there would also be Fastmails https://jmap.io/
Unless I'm missing something about what they're doing, this is a basic SIEVE script that filters anything not explicitly whitelisted into a folder.
You could probably build that with a bunch of hacks but you'll not get a polished consumer friendly feature out of that. They are not in competition with people running mutt and a bunch of custom scripts, it's more of an alternative for people using Gmail with Gmail apps currently and don't even know what's IMAP.
Again I'm not arguing that IMAP isn't creaky and clumsy but let's not pretend that lack of power is the reason they didn't use it.
But what's weird is this sense of anger at products that aren't as flexible. It's like being upset that a new restaurant opened up because they have a set menu and don't let you make your own food. If you like cooking your own meals, great! Keep doing that. This restaurant is for people that want someone else to make a meal for them.
With slack I understand the frustration a little more, since it's something an entire company is going to be using and asking you to use.
It's like operating systems. People who want to have it their very specific way use Linux. People who want it to just work out of the box use macOS (but not Catalina).
There are some innovative things here but they want $99/year for it and it doesn’t support IMAP. It’s also ugly as sin and looks straight out of 2007.
The biggest hurdle is that it just won’t play nice with all of my email accounts. I would have to maintain my “normal” mail application and also maintain Hey. The benefits Hey might offer are ruined by not being able to have a consistent workflow across all of my accounts.
That's exactly how you'd do it, and the functionality definitely exists - all handled on the server side. See: learning spam from ham by dragging to/from the spam folder.
If I were building it for my parents, I'd say "anything in Pending/Held/StrangerDanger that you flag will be whitelisted and will be in the Inbox from then on".
Flagging a message on iOS Mail is pretty straightforward - swipe+tap or long-press+tap+tap and easy enough conceptually as a "this is good" action, I think?
Backend picks up the flag change, adds the address to the inbox, strips the flag, and moves that message to the inbox.
Add "move it to junk to undo the whitelisting" for completion (also easy on iOS Mail).
Perhaps not as polished as writing a custom app to do it, no, but it seems fairly consumer friendly to me?
It's not obvious to me. Mind elaborating on what the obvious solution is? Giving up 30% of your revenue on what's likely to be your largest platform when your competitors don't have to isn't obvious, so there must be another option I'm missing.
What they're doing is exactly what mafias do. Look for the weak, force them to need your help or else, then extract as much money as you can.
I love Apple and all their products but this services growth strategy is putting a bad taste in a bunch of people's mouths.
Some people like to very carefully craft an experience on their own and some people are happy to have someone else do that.