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Old 6 Aug 2020, 09:19 PM   #31
TenFour
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Pay for 1 year now and you’ll have a lifetime @hey.com email address.
Ha! And be stuck with @hey.com like millions are stuck with @yahoo.com or @hotmail.com. Everytime I see one of those addresses I know the person is of a certain age and think to myself "have some self respect and get a decent address!" Seriously, if you are applying for jobs, get yourself a decent email address and not something that will instantly categorize you, for better or worse. @hey.com just doesn't sound professional to me.
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Old 7 Aug 2020, 05:54 AM   #32
janusz
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Doesn't it depend on the kind of job one applies for? Why should a nurse, or a burger flipper, or a bank clerk be disadvantaged because of a yahoo/Hotmail/hey account?
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Old 7 Aug 2020, 06:05 AM   #33
TenFour
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Why should a nurse, or a burger flipper, or a bank clerk be disadvantaged because of a yahoo/Hotmail/hey account?
Every job is important to the person applying, so why not put your best foot forward? Let them know you are different, more responsible, a forward thinker and not just a sheep that uses the same email address you created in high school. If nothing else, having a different address might be that little thing that makes your application stand out from the crowd and get noticed.
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Old 7 Aug 2020, 08:07 AM   #34
Berenburger
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Originally Posted by TenFour View Post
Every job is important to the person applying, so why not put your best foot forward? Let them know you are different, more responsible, a forward thinker and not just a sheep that uses the same email address you created in high school. If nothing else, having a different address might be that little thing that makes your application stand out from the crowd and get noticed.
I think a Hey address meets this exactly.
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Old 7 Aug 2020, 08:24 AM   #35
TenFour
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I think a Hey address meets this exactly.
To me it says you have poor judgment and are not careful with money. Paying $99 for any untested new faddy email service with a name that is trying to be hip shows bad judgment, IMHO.
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Old 7 Aug 2020, 03:04 PM   #36
lpn
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Originally Posted by TenFour View Post
Every job is important to the person applying, so why not put your best foot forward? Let them know you are different, more responsible, a forward thinker and not just a sheep that uses the same email address you created in high school. If nothing else, having a different address might be that little thing that makes your application stand out from the crowd and get noticed.
For most positions the potential employer looks for stability and not for somebody jumping ship too often. As such a good yahoo or hotmail address would be perfectly ok. By good, I mean a reasonable username and not things like fancy123.
Of course, things would be different if it is a creative position or mid-level or senior position in IT.
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Old 7 Aug 2020, 08:19 PM   #37
TenFour
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For most positions the potential employer looks for stability and not for somebody jumping ship too often.
OT, but I do some hiring and have for many years. My first cull through applications is the person's cover letter to see how articulate they are, whether they address the job specifics, and where they are located. If that all passes muster, I then look at the resume and see what their specific job experience is. I usually split the applications into three piles: very interesting, possible, and reject. 90% go in the reject pile for one reason or another. The email address and phone should be prominent at the top of the cover letter and resume with your address. Sometimes, a person's email address, right there at the top of everything, stands out in a positive way and might be that tiny extra that gets your letter a little more attention and has you stand out from the crowd since 95% will have a generic gmail or .mac address. Even some local ISP addresses might make you stand out. If you have to go generic, gmail seems to be the best--it is used by everyone right up to some CEOs I correspond with.
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Old 7 Aug 2020, 08:26 PM   #38
janusz
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IMveryHO rejecting an application for a non-IT job based on an unfashionable email address is equivalent to rejection because of the wrong postcode/street name.
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Old 7 Aug 2020, 08:36 PM   #39
TenFour
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IMveryHO rejecting an application for a non-IT job based on an unfashionable email address is equivalent to rejection because of the wrong postcode/street name.
I don't think it would get you rejected, but it might get you a little extra notice either good or bad. For example, I still see an occasional @aol.com address and I know the person's somewhat older right away. Chances are I am even older than that person, but a young hiring manager might see that address as a turnoff. Often the youngest, most inexperienced people in an HR department are assigned to make the first selections through a pile of job applicants.
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Old 9 Aug 2020, 10:57 PM   #40
curvefan
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Originally Posted by TenFour View Post
To me it says you have poor judgment and are not careful with money. Paying $99 for any untested new faddy email service with a name that is trying to be hip shows bad judgment, IMHO.
Yeah, just like George Costanza, I'm also careful with money.: Seriously, I really do think they're charging too much for this product as advertised. Maybe it's not a lot of money to some folks but it sure is to me.

$99.00/yr for email? I have three letter domain names like aol.com and usa.com that are free, and I'm sure there are other three letter domain names just as good or better than hey.com that provide email services.

It might be tempting to try at half that price or less, but for me $99.00/yr. is way too much.

And again, I'm cheap.....
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Old 27 Sep 2020, 04:42 AM   #41
ioneja
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I decided to give HEY.COM another chance since some of the ideas had appealed to me before, despite my other reservations/issues. And my second trial ended up being much more positive than the first time around. I'm still not signed up and paid yet officially, but I will go for it when they release custom domains (hopefully soon, supposedly by the end of the year).

In particular, what I finally realized was more of a personal epiphany about my own email usage patterns, and how I've actually been stressing myself out over the years by my approach. I realized my own current email workflow had evolved into an inefficient, distracting, and often stress-inducing headache, filled with workarounds and duct-tape adaptations, kind of a Frankensteinian mess... In other words, my current approach is *terrible*, and the more I thought about it, actually kind of unhealthy! I didn't know that until after my second HEY.COM trial.

Not that HEY.COM is the perfect answer to what I discovered about my own existing process. But I began to look at it not so much as an email provider per se, but more of a way to reassess how I work, and as a collection of ideas that are pretty well integrated, that I could apply to how I do things and process messages/information much better than I did before.

So I'm planning on signing up in the coming months once they release their custom domain option, and I'll take it slowly. I want to see how it goes just for one domain that I often use for customer support for clients. I don't expect to move tons of email over -- I use several other providers for different purposes/personal/business, etc... But I now want to run a longer experiment and see how HEY evolves, and how my own approach to email might evolve along with it. So it's worth the $99 to me at least for one year, just as a way to help me rethink how I work.

HEY is definitely still figuring itself out, and it's still a 1.0 release, with all that "1.0" means, so it has a long way to go. But assuming they continue to refine some of the rough points that bug me, I think they're on to something good for those who feel like they might benefit from this approach. Again, I'm not saying it's the end-all-be-all answer. But the way they've done it has already made me rethink what I'm currently doing, which is a good thing. And BTW they seem eager to listen to customers and improve -- I've already communicated with support several times and they were outstanding so far.

Anyway, thought I'd post that my opinion has changed, and they have won over a new customer, at least for a one year-long experiment.
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Old 27 Sep 2020, 05:11 AM   #42
TenFour
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But I began to look at it not so much as an email provider per se, but more of a way to reassess how I work, and as a collection of ideas that are pretty well integrated, that I could apply to how I do things and process messages/information much better than I did before.
From a distance not having tried Hey it appears to me that you need to use their way of processing messages/information, not your own way. Maybe their way of doing things will work for you, but it seems like you are going to be stuck with what someone else decides is best for you.
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Old 27 Sep 2020, 05:49 AM   #43
ioneja
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Originally Posted by TenFour View Post
From a distance not having tried Hey it appears to me that you need to use their way of processing messages/information, not your own way. Maybe their way of doing things will work for you, but it seems like you are going to be stuck with what someone else decides is best for you.
Yeah, that's close to what I initially thought the first time I trialed it, although from the beginning I did like some of the features, despite some of the concerns I had.

However, the second time through, my opinion really started changing after I gave it a good solid trial... I actually didn't feel locked in to use "their way" as much as I thought I would, but rather it dawned on me that I had become lost over the years, and sort of locked in to my own unhealthy way I had been dealing with email up to this point. It was a strange epiphany to have over something I had been doing for so many years. YMMV of course and it may have no appeal to many people. Definitely a niche email service.

And don't get me wrong, there are things about it that need refinement, and it needs a few more key features that I'd like to see that many of us take for granted these days, and it really is a very "opinionated" approach to email that some people will simply not like at all.

However, in my case, I started seeing how the concepts would actually save me time, reduce distraction, help me focus, help reorganize how I process email, help me better manage and combine and annotate conversations, track attachments much better, think of email in terms of people as opposed to threads, reduce messy workarounds I've been doing for years, reframe how I consume lower-priority email newsletters/subscriptions (like with blogs, serial content), etc., etc.

And while HEY does tend to "escort" you into their world the way they see it, it is still flexible. Not nearly as flexible as something like FastMail though, of course... FastMail can be very powerful and very tweakable, and if someone values far more granular control, then HEY will be a hard sell. In fact, I fell into this category. But with more experimentation on real-world conversations with real people, in some ways I found HEY to be more flexible and powerful than I initially thought. But not in a granular way... in a "workflowy way." It's not just one feature that does this though... it's really a combination of features that help workflows and organizing threads/content more naturally/organically... at least more like the way my own desk is organized. Hard to explain how all these little features actually combine to help me rethink my process... but that's what happened with me.

So they are worth a 1-year extended "trial" on one of my domains, and I'll be happy to pay the $99 to see how it goes.

Worst case, I can take some of these ideas and implement some version of them right in FastMail, for example, just by rethinking how I use filters, labels, folders, etc.... One can basically implement many of these workflow ideas without ever using HEY. But it's the way they combine features and structure the service to influence the user to rethink how they use email that makes it potentially special, and worth it for me to spend more time with it. But again, if someone wants/needs very specific granular control, then HEY is not the right service for them, and likely never will be.
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Old 27 Sep 2020, 07:16 AM   #44
ioneja
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I just saw this on Fastmail's website -- https://fastmail.blog/2020/07/24/email-workflow/

So about one month after HEY.COM officially launched, Fastmail posted about "rethinking" email with "workflow" as the central idea of their post, and "how to find more focus, spare your inbox from non-essential emails, decide who can email you, quiet your notifications..." They even mention some of the key bullet points from HEY like proxy tracking pixels, etc... almost as if this page is a response covering many of the marketing points of HEY.COM, but written in such a way that showcases what Fastmail has already been able to do. Interesting.

All the tips they recommend in the blog post are useful or worth considering, of course, but it reminds me that in the Venn diagram of target markets, there are a bunch of potential customers that overlap between Fastmail and HEY.COM, and it appears that Fastmail is quite conscious of this. I wouldn't be surprised if they continue to develop some more "workflowy" features like their relatively recent labels, VIP notifications, snoozing, etc., and they tweak their main marketing copy on their website to reflect a more workflow-centric approach, given the trends like with HEY, OnMail, Superhuman, etc.

Makes me wonder if there is also a market rivalry developing between Fastmail and HEY.

I also think this will be really good for Fastmail users going forward, and keep pressure on HEY to give users more granular control and flexibility. HEY is clearly aware of Fastmail, judging by the interviews and social media responses of HEY. It will be fun to see where they both go next.
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Old 27 Sep 2020, 08:34 AM   #45
TenFour
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Makes me wonder if there is also a market rivalry developing between Fastmail and HEY.
It's a very crowded market and difficult to differentiate yourself due to extreme price competition. Most of the major pay services hover around $50 per year for very similar service levels, and with most businesses already purchasing some version of Microsoft or Google business services it is hard to justify spending additional money for a separate email service.
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