Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Basecamp’s founders are trying to start an email rebellion

protocol.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 219 posts

Re: Basecamp’s founders are trying to start an email rebellion

#201

Post by marcolussetti »

msh wrote: post #149
marcolussetti wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was starting to get intrigued reading the article, but inability to import old mail (and inability to export backups via IMAP) I'd a definite deal breaker for me.

But you can export in mbox format.

Hadn't realized that, admittedly I kinda stopped reading after the no IMAP, no import. Thank you for correcting me.

I'm still struggling to understand the decision making here though: this is a premium product pricing itself above the various GSuite/Exchange/Online/Fastmail, and demanding a significant time investment from users (for the whitelisting). There is of course nothing wrong with that, and I really like the idea of a premium, well crafted email system.

However, the lack of archive import (and of sync'ing to alternate email addresses it seems?) seems puzzling here.

I'm not sure that the Venn diagram intersection of people who really care about email but do not require import of their current archives is a large enough market to go after.

I have a small-ish archive (15 years) and any service that wasn't able to work with is a nonstarter for me. I imagine while not the most common situation, we are talking about premium email here...

Re: Basecamp’s founders are trying to start an email rebellion

#202

Post by lucasfdacunha »

wazoox wrote: post #181
kyawzazaw wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For people who doesn’t have the time/skills/energy to do what you described but still want to avoid being tracked, somewhat care about privacy and using email with less distractions.

Energy of not using a webmail? IIRC Thunderbird as well as most other email clients don't download remote images by default.

Dude, don't assume that everybody is like you. Reading emails on text mode and blocking pixels with some kind of email client is something that only a few people that use email do.

You're probably tech-savvy (and also the people that you interact with probably are), that eliminates almost the majority of people that use email. The average web/internet user is dumb, really dumb. The easier for them to do something, the better.

Re: Basecamp’s founders are trying to start an email rebellion

#203

Post by PatrolX »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #5

I’m disappointed in Hey so far. It’s a closed system (no IMAP). They are charging a premium price for it over Fastmail or Google Gsuite. There is no calendar. No ability to import old emails into it. Seems like they could have just released a mail app sitting on top of Fastmail and had more/better features from day one.

Same, not impressed at all.

I tried sending a couple of photos to my Hey account and it rejected the email at around 20MB in attachments.

They claim 100GB of storage space, but what use is that if a 20MB attachment can't even make it through.

Re: Basecamp’s founders are trying to start an email rebellion

#204

Post by kyawzazaw »

wazoox wrote: post #181
kyawzazaw wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For people who doesn’t have the time/skills/energy to do what you described but still want to avoid being tracked, somewhat care about privacy and using email with less distractions.

Energy of not using a webmail? IIRC Thunderbird as well as most other email clients don't download remote images by default.

most people I know don't even bother downloading an email client and these range from a lot of office professionals to professors to students.

a lot of people just don't bother setting up their email settings to block image downloads or read in text only or etc

Re: Basecamp’s founders are trying to start an email rebellion

#205

Post by alexmingoia »

drchopchop wrote: post #137
upofadown wrote: post #8

>Most of the Basecamp team's recent rebelliousness, and seemingly the initial reason for building Hey, has to do with spy pixels. How can you tell the difference between a "spy pixel" and an image? Whatever criteria you use can be worked around. Email clients should not allow emails to initiate outgoing network connections... period ... and most of the good ones don't by default.

So do we go back to a world of completely plain-text emails? No buttons? Links buried in a wall of ASCII? We use SendGrid to fire important, user-anticipated emails (i.e. "the Zoom class you paid for is starting at 8:30 AM, here's the private link"). Blocking all images is insane, and would set back email UX to the BBS ages. Blocking all SendGrid-served images would simply mean people host images on their own domain…

Fastmail blocks loading of images by default. I have never needed to load the images to get whatever I need from the email. And if I need to I can click a button to load them if I trust the sender.

Re: Basecamp’s founders are trying to start an email rebellion

#206

Post by mceachen »

pradn wrote: post #125
agd wrote: post #13

This is quite an innovative approach to email, and they describe the features here: https://hey.com/features/ - screening by default - removes email tracking pixels - streamlined reply/read flows - improved attachment handling - doesn't interrupt you by default There's also a video tour of the product from the CEO here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=296&v=UCeYTysLyG... For me as a gmail user I'm keen to…

I thought Gmail loaded images when it got the email, not when users opened it? Doesn't this prevent pixels from tracking?

You can disable automatic image loading on the settings page via a desktop browser.

Re: Basecamp’s founders are trying to start an email rebellion

#207

Post by morberg »

rocha wrote: post #173
andolanra wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody I know who used Inbox feels that the current Gmail interface—even with some Inbox features backported—is an acceptable substitute for Inbox.

Have you tried the Simplify GMail browser extension? It made the transition from Inbox to GMail less painful to me. https://simpl.fyi/

That looks quite nice. Is there an alternative for Safari?

Re: Basecamp’s founders are trying to start an email rebellion

#208

Post by hellofunk »

nickjj wrote: post #199
jb1991 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you could really use something like https://calendly.com/ .

That would require mucking around with another external tool. Google's calendar works quite well. It's one of those things where everything just works with the least amount of set up on my end.

In this case, this particular tool saves a tremendous amount of time in doing what you’re describing. I just started using it last year and was reluctant to, and it really does act like a little scheduling assistant.

Re: Basecamp’s founders are trying to start an email rebellion

#210

Post by redis_mlc »

rossdavidh wrote: post #189
Bootwizard wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why will we have to see? It's not like this is the first time anyone has worked remotely. People have been working remotely for decades, which is proof that it works for those people. In fact entire companies recently (last 5ish years) have created entirely remote companies.

In at least some companies (e.g. Yahoo), they decided it worked, and then later decided no, it didn't. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a lot of backpedaling on remote work, after six months or so.

The Yahoo situation was that mgmt. counted people who said they worked remotely vs. "vpn" connections, and mgmt. said that they found employees were lying about actually doing work.

Some of the things not clarified were:

- engineers had alternate vpn and connection methods, so what was the breakdown of engineers vs. non-engineers? Were all VPN connections counted (I don't think they were.)

- a large percentage of the staff had mentally checked out, evidenced by the gym being full between 1 pm and 5 pm. That was a bigger issue, since showing up is meaningless if you're not engaged. This isn't as bad as it sounds, as Mayer's job was to preserve the value of the Alibaba holdings, not do anything at Yahoo, hence the logo font change and ymail facelifts.

- does one have to be on a vpn connection to do work? Employees can edit a Word document without being connected.

- I think the parking lots were full, so some staff staying home was a good thing, rather than circling the block for who knows how long.

So if you're going to use stats, they should be based on results, not something as fuzzy as "vpn" counts, as in the Yahoo case. Unless your agenda is "let's ban remote work."

Source: worked there.

Post reply on HN