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Data Custody The Next Computer

Email and Workflows – Part 1

“HEY is not about workarounds. it’s about workflows,”

– Jason Fried, in the demo video for his new email service/client HEY

It’s a brave take on email. The last time anyone took on email with real vigour was eleven years ago. It was Google, with Google Wave. Tim O’Reilly termed it “email if it were invented today” instead of back in the 1970s. Google itself described it as bridging the “divides between different types of communication — email versus chat, or conversations versus documents” which really was even more ambitious.

Wave lasted a little over a year. Since then there’s been a lot of innovation in the design of email clients – desktop and mobile, especially after iOS’ popularity, but not in the basics of how you handle email. Even Google’s own Inbox, shut down but with many features merged with the mainstream Gmail, was tame compared to the audacity of Wave.

HEY is the first take I have seen that is in the vein of Wave.

But – as one comment online said – it’s an opinionated take on what email should be. Specifically, the opinion of Jason and DHH who have built it. Their workflows.

Contrast this with an open-platform email client like Thunderbird, which can be modified, via extensions, to suit essentially any workflow, any layout, any shortcuts. It’s a shame it’s not as popular as it ought to be.

During a phase in 2012-13 whenI dealt with many external parties at work and therefore several different individuals across different team, I used the outrageous SEEK extension that displayed my primary Thunderbird interface like this (screenshot from the SEEK homepage):

It resembled the iTunes Column Browser mode and was invaluable in quickly toggling between different ways of filtering my email. I was/am a fan of Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts, so I used an extension to add those very shortcuts to my Thunderbird. There used to be a whole clutch of Thunderbird extensions I would use to create an experience that was uniquely mine.

Now you could make the case that these are workarounds to the fundamental problem of email, not workflows – the very thing that HEY avoids. But I’d argue that the sum of these customisations resulted in a Thunderbird experience that matched my communications workflow then.

(Part 2: The single change I made to Thunderbird to create a whole new workflow)