A lot of the features advertised by HEY have been sorely missing from Gmail for a long time. I wouldn't exactly call them innovative. Gmail will have an easy time implementing these features, now that someone is kicking them out of their decade-long slumber.

Plenty of people will be happy to pay for a quality and not-Google email service. Glad to see they have the resources and willpower to do this!

Google had an innovative email platform called Inbox that was widely loved by its users and they killed it two years ago. If the market is not billions of people they just don't care about it.

I loved Inbox, but what actually happened there was that there were two visions of Gmail 2.0 internally. Inbox didn’t win, partly because it was written in a nightmarish C++ framework, but some of its best features were brought into Gmail.

Gmail is a conservatively managed product, but it does improve over time.

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?

Now you know one. :)

Main thing its missing which i miss daily is bundles. Auto travel bundle was super helpful. Also it had a better ui..

I'm intrigued. How could the framework of a certain programming language affect the product, in this case Inbox?

My understanding is that development of Inbox slowed and became unpleasant because the C++ generated JS was unattractive to developers at Google, and it didn’t have the internal support for a rewrite. Since the Gmail product was the incumbent, has more developers and is probably refactored often enough to maintain a certain code quality level, and several Inbox features were compatible with Gmail, the Inbox product had no leverage to get itself enough support to stay alive.

What is Gmail written in?

Java, compiled with Closure

Google should have written seasons 7 and 8 of Game of Thrones.

Just chuckled at this.

Gmail won't implement most of these features, due to the classic innovator's dilemma. Too many people use and expect Gmail to work like a regular email app, chronological stack of emails with read and unread, so even though these features may help the more productive users, Gmail can't alienate most of its other users.

What they could do is create another email app, which they did called Inbox, but then they killed it and most of its features, which were similar to Hey's, haven't been incorporated, precisely due to the reasons above.

I think being able to edit the subject and take private notes directly attached to the email are really good features.

"take private notes directly attached to the email"

what does this mean?

Just a guess: maybe they treat email threads as a document. You can then add comments to it (i.e just notes for yourself and not for others)

I get it now, thanks y'all.

Imagine using a draft reply in Gmail as a notepad on a thread. It's that plus a few other things, but you don't have to worry about accidentally hitting send at some point, it's properly designated as a note (how the interfaces displays it, I don't know).

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

This might have been the plan, but it doesn't happen in my experience. I've tested it multiple times and Gmail loads those images when you open the email and it's possible to track when users open their email. It also appears that Gmail loads those tracking pixels every time you open that email, doesn't do caching, so it's possible to track how many times the recipient opens the email.

The redeeming quality is that by proxying those images, your IP and User-Agent are no longer leaked. But that's it.

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

the Video looks great. Reply later, and set aside do seem really useful. I'd like that for work email, not just a personal hey.com address. I wonder if they considered just building an email client. A lot of this doesn't require a special backend, and could be done for any email provider with a special client. Then it wouldn't require anyone to change addresses.