Wednesday, November 4, 2020

Hey hey you you, I don't like your email.

 So, back in June when I first heard of hey.com and their email redesign, I was so excited. Gmail is great but email was becoming such a chore and hey had a lot of features that I thought would simplify my life and emails so I wrote a very heartfelt email to them to get the access code. Here's a little snippit from the e-mail I sent them. 



After sending this email, I waited patiently, checking my email twice every day to get the invite code. After 3 days I started to think it would never show up, but a week later, the code was in my email. Imagine my excitement, I went ahead and set up my email. I'm online as "heyshaha" on almost every social media site (it's both a greeting and my name, or in my language Dhivehi "hey" means "laughing" and I often say I'm laughter because that's my branding, haha) and one of the MAJOR reasons I was drawn to the hey email was clearly the name hey. Yes, I am a sentimental ball of energy, I know it. Clearly, my decision making is very much emotionally affected. I really was sold. Back then all my friends could hear was me gushing about hey. I showed everyone (including my boss, haha) how cool it was. You can see my stream of tweets here about just how much I loved being a part of hey. 


Let's talk about the love story of hey and I. What did I love about hey? First, we have come to the conclusion that 80% of me paying for this specific service was the name. Now that that's out of the picture, let's talk about the features I loved. 

The Screener

As someone who gets SO MUCH SPAM (even when I have filters set up, ugh) I was so excited that email was getting treated as a special thing where no one can just barge into my email until I opened the door and let them in. They could knock once and I know they're there and if I let them in, then only can they get in. I still love this feature a lot but it's still very manual so at the beginning you'd have to screen in every email until you build a good system. I didn't mind it to be very honest. Having a clean inbox really was such a great feeling and I felt much lighter, like a load off my mind. 

Paper Trail and The Feed

I also loved that I could put all my online shopping recepits and bills out of my inbox (or the imbox according to hey, which is also such a clever little thing I loved. Hey's branding really is on point) into the paper trail. All the newsletters and other subscriptions I had, I could neatly tuck into the feed and read them later whenever I wanted. It was so easy. 

Reading emails together in a whole thread

This is another feature I really love and used a lot. Instead of clicking back and again clicking on a new email I could read everything? Yes! I started actually reading my newsletters ahaha. It worked really well until it didn't which is that even when I have read an email through this it still shows up as unread on my imbox until I manually click it, which was a bother so I stopped using this feature, sigh. Why doesn't good things last??

Sending large files without using Third Party Apps

I love WeTransfer and have been an avid user for years but being able to send large files just through email was so convenient. I think I used it once but the fact that I could was great. 

Clean Interface

I loved loved how clean hey looked. Gmail can look very cluttered and noisy but hey was fresh and clean and everytime I looked at my imbox I felt clean myself like I didn't have mutliple tabs running in brain all the time. I still love this and sometimes open hey just to see how nice it really looks. I'm by no means a techie, I'm your average internet user with just enough IT knowledge to manouver most websites, that's it so to me, this felt so wonderful. 

No notifications

I do love not getting notifications, I hate the notification sounds and it always makes me anxious and I loved this feature until I missed a very important email for uni. I think if hey at least had the badges option, I would love this feature more. Email is still such an important part that sometimes you need notifications. There is the option of clicking on for push notifs from threads yes, but this was a first time email so I couldn't have that on. 

Some other features I loved but never really had the chance to use much include being able to rename threads and merge emails into one, attach notes to myself on certain emails, the set aside feature and reply reminder. They all really sound wonderful. 

So what went wrong you might ask? How did this love story become a tragedy? Well, it started last month. So from July till late September, I really didn't have to use they hey email much except for personal emails. When college started in September (I'm a part time lecturer so I use my personal email for college) and I had to keep using email more frequently, hiccups started to happen. 

First, labeling was extremely hard? When I clicked to select messages, the button that uses it also was the one that showed the picture/name of sender so I couldn't rely on visual clues and I had to manually read through the subject of each email to figure out which is which. I thought, okay this is a little annoying but okay even in gmail I still have to read the name, so whatever, right? 

Next, not having a "Sent Mail" folder was really really really annoying. I had to remember when I sent the email or who I sent to or a keyword and I'm VERY VERY bad at remembering things so clearly this was when my love started turning sour. At this point I was like, I paid 99 dollars for email during a freaking pandemic so as the eldest daughter of a South Asian family, I had to use what I paid for, no matter how hard or annoying it was, right? That's what my parents would do and damned that was what I was going to do. 

I also lost a bunch of drafts and had to redraft emails a lot because I didn't know where the drafts folder was. Now this was completely my fault because if you go to the hey main menu, drafts is there but I didn't notice it back then. I have to be completely honest so I can't blame hey for this, but my own ignorance. 

Then the issue was that I could not mail to just one mail in the thread, it had to be to the most recent mail in the thread which didn't work for me cos another teacher had mailed and I didn't want to include her email cos it wasn't even relevant to mine but hey wouldn't let me so I had to manually delete her email from the thread and then reply which was ofcourse, very annoying but again, I complied. I was willing to change for "better email". 

Now, let's come to the breaking point. This was when I finally decided enough was enough. I had to submit an assignment draft and a table with some details through mail so as usual, I copy pasted the details (the table) from Ms Excel into the mail like how I normally would and bam, it lost the table formatting. I deleted it and redid thinking there was an issue. I checked around formatting options but alas the table formatting just wasn't there and that's when I realized, damn. My entire life is on excel sheets and tables. After a lot of frustration I was like, FINE I'll just send it like so. So I started attached my file my dragging and dropping it and THE FREAKING FILE GOT ATTACHED IN THE MIDDLE OF A WORD. NOT EVEN AFTER THE WORD BUT RIGHT FREAKING MIDDLE OF THE WORD. I can no longer look at the word "Understanding" the same way. I mean look at this??? I'm surprised my course coordinator could understand my mail considering what a mess it looks like. The table looks terrible and the way the attachment just is in the MIDDLE OF A WORD still makes me so angry. 



This was the day I decided I won't let my South Asian value for money stop me from being upset with EMAIL and forwarded my hey email back to my gmail. Since I've paid a full year I guess I still can use they hey email until next June but only 3 months into this I'm already fed up, the shininess has faded away and I'm stuck with having more issues with email than I should. 

Again, I'm not a big enough techie to know whether I really didn't know or whether hey does have solutions for these and I just haven't found them? Maybe my friends were right in saying I am a bit pretentious for paying for fancy email haha, either way it was nice while it lasted and I still have a soft spot for hey but I'm not gonna continue using it. Definitely not worth the money for me and left me with 2002 problems in 2020 and this year is already annoying enough without having to be frustrated with not being able to copy paste a table into an email. The rest of my life was already on Gsuite so yes, staying with gmail seemed to be easier too, I could easily use it syncing to my calender, classroom and to drive anyway.

So it's adios to you hey. I hope someone else is able to enjoy you but it isn't me. This love affair is over for now, as we say in Dhivehi it's time to vadhaau kiyan (say goodbye) to you!

Scribbled by when the clock ticked
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