This article was sponsored by our friends at HEY—an email service from the people at Basecamp.
If you’re like most people, opening your inbox every day might feel like an overwhelming (dare we say, anxiety-inducing) task. We don’t blame you. We’re living in a world where a large part of our daily communication happens online. There’s no doubt it can be stressful trying to keep up with the seemingly never-ending overflow of our inbox.
Well, what if we told you that one company just gave email a giant makeover—one that’s designed to make your workflow a whole lot easier? Basecamp, the widely known project management tool we all know and love, recently launched a new email service called HEY. There’s been quite a buzz floating around the new service that claims to have “transformed email into something you want to use, not something you’re forced to deal with.”
“Email 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.” — Jason Fried, CEO Basecamp
So, does HEY live up to all the hype? We got to try it out for ourselves and, to be completely frank, using HEY made us realize just how many problems we’ve been tolerating with email for so long—the last few decades to be exact.
We’re about to break down five of these biggest problems we have with email, and how HEY is designed to help solve them. Read on to learn more about a few unique features HEY has to offer that you might not even realize you needed.
📥 1. Vet emails before they reach your inbox
The problem: Many of us have to block off a chunk of our day to go through tons of new emails, prioritize what’s important, and hope that eventually, we’ll reach inbox 0. The question is, why are we wasting so much time sifting through messages that we didn’t want or need to receive in the first place?
The solution: While HEY doesn’t stop people from sending you messages, it does let you screen emails‚ so anytime a new client or brand contacts you, you get to decide whether you want to keep receiving emails from them or not. In the long run, you’ll end up receiving fewer emails, and get to focus on the clients and leads that actually deserve your attention.
🔎 2. Rename any subject line for clarity
The problem: Chances are, you’ve received plenty of emails with vague subject lines (or none at all) from clients or project collaborators giving you absolutely no indication of the content inside. And if you’re not the one who started the thread, you’re stuck with whatever non-descriptive subject line someone else chose, making it even more difficult to comb through your inbox and find exactly what you’re looking for.
The solution: With HEY, you have control over every subject line that hits your inbox. You can rename it so it makes the most sense to you, without changing it for the recipient on the other end. It’s a game-changing way to organize your inbox so it’s intuitive to you and your brain.
🔔 3. Be selective about your notifications
The problem: The email services we’re used to today only give us the option to turn notifications on or off completely. But what if we just want to be alerted about a few specific threads that we really care about?
The solution: HEY lets you choose which people you want to get notifications from, or if you want to get notifications from a specific email thread. This level of personalization keeps you informed about the things that need your immediate attention, without having your phone go off every time you receive an email.
📎 4. Find attachments in a central library
The problem: We’ve all been there before: digging for attachments through our inbox because we can’t remember who sent it or in what thread it lives. There’s no denying it’s a pain, and a huge time-suck—especially if you’re managing multiple client projects at a time.
The solution: HEY gathers every attachment you receive and compiles them all into an organized, siftable library. In this library, you can quickly find the attachments you’re looking for by filtering through file type and/or sender.
🔒 5. Protect your privacy
The problem: As you probably know, many companies can easily track what emails you open, how often you open them, and when you open them. They can even track your general location based on your IP address when opening their email! That’s a pretty big invasion of privacy that you might not even be aware of.
The solution: HEY removes spy trackers from every email before it enters your inbox. You’ll still get the email, the sender just won’t know you opened it or be able to access any other information. You can learn more about HEY’s spy tracking technology here.
The bottom line…
Whether or not you think email needs fixing in the first place, trying HEY will probably bring to light some issues that could definitely use improvement in the way we currently communicate online. In fact, we’re pretty surprised it’s taken this long for someone to challenge the way email works, and design solutions that aim to fit our needs in this day and age. For that alone, we’re pretty impressed.
If you want to see what all of the hype is about, try HEY for 14 days free here.
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