Canion dot Blog

2021-11-28: I’ve updated this post in an effort to correct what were missing images. With thanks to @chrisl_at for letting me know of the problem.

Basecamp has released their much-anticipated¹ take on email, Hey. As a long-time fan of Basecamp and a light user of their Basecamp Personal² product I was interested to see how they were going to address the issue of email.

First off, Hey looks beautiful. Beyond looks it has a number of interesting features to support a healthier and more efficient email workflow.

Hey is a subscription service and I have no issue with this whatsoever. I already pay for email services, preferring to be a customer of an email service provider, rather than the product itself³. I’m a happy user of Fastmail which I use in conjunction with SaneBox, MailMate on my iMac, and Preside on iOS.

For my purposes then, I’m not looking for an email service that will allow me to migrate away from a free-of-charge provider.

Herein lies the problem, at least in terms of me being a customer of Hey. Hey is a standalone service. Unlike a typical email provider it doesn’t expose an IMAP interface which other apps can use. If it did this, it would probably lose all the pretty add-ons they have built into the system. Furthermore it doesn’t allow the use of a custom domain. You get a nice @hey.com email address but you can’t BYO a domain name. A key part of my email infrastructure is owning my domain and emails form a component of that. Moving to Hey would mean stepping away from that lovely setup. I like owning @andrewcanion.com and @canion.me.

For these reasons I quickly ascertained that Hey was not a product for me.

That’s not to say that it doesn’t have some clever workflows, and it does look pretty. I can’t replicate the pretty, but in watching the walkthrough demo by Jason Fried I was fairly certain I could replicate most of the functionality.

So to satisfy my own curiosity I worked with the products I already have - SaneBox and MailMate - to see if I could construct a Hey-style workflow.

Let’s step through the way I built my copy-cat workflow.

Triage - Yes or No

Hey lets you select whether new users will be added to your inbox (they call it an “Imbox” but I’m not going there).

I use SaneBox for this instead. It does the same sort of triage, using machine learning to determine whether a sender is important to you or not. If it thinks they are, it goes to your inbox. If not, it goes to an alternative “SaneLater” folder.

I have enabled notifications only for email that lands in my Inbox, so that matches the ‘quiet by design’ feature of Hey.

Focus & Reply

Within Hey, this is a neat bundle of messages that are tagged to be dealt with later, most ideally in a focused session of email. They sit as a little visual stack at the bottom of the window. I can’t match the visuals, but I should be able to match the functionality with MailMate.

I’ve created a new Smart Mailbox, named Focus & Reply that looks across All Messages, and filters as per these conditions:

Note the keyword designation. MailMate lets you apply keywords to any email. To make this easier, I’ve added a keywords toolbar to MailMate, and have it set to showing the two that are relevant to the Hey-style workflow. I have a magnifying glass for Focus & Reply, and a pushpin for Set Aside.

Now, if I click the icon on any email thread, it is tagged accordingly. I’ve enabled a column to show the keywords, so an email might look like this - note the magnifying glass:

Now only emails that I’ve tagged by clicking the magnifying glass will appear in the Focus & Reply smart mailbox.

Set Aside

In Hey, Set Aside is designated for mail that you want to reference later. These emails are also taken away from the Inbox view.

As with Focus & Reply, I’ve set the pushpin tag to act as the determinant. Together with another Smart Search, I’ve got this group of emails configured as such:

But to get the workflow where these are ‘out of view’ in my regular Inbox, I need to configure my Inbox view as well. So I’ve created an Unread Inbox, that works on a series of mailboxes and applies a condition to only show unread mail, as such:

Now if I want to reference my Set Aside email, I can click the relevant Mailbox in the Sidebar.

The Feed

Hey uses a concept of The Feed almost like a social media scroll of email incorporating newsletters, advisories and all the other non-timely information we get via email.

I created this with the help of SaneBox. All my The Feed smart folder does is show me the contents of the default SaneBox SaneNews folder. It generally knows what should go in there, and I can train it as I go simply by moving mail into that folder as I see fit.

Paper Trail

The Paper Trail in Hey is for receipts, invoices, and other such transactional information.

Here, I created a custom SaneBox folder to replicate this feature. As I get receipts and things, I will move a few into this email folder and SaneBox will quickly learn and take care of them for me in the future.

Other Email

For now, I’m still using the SaneLater mail folder to catch other less-important email. Looking at Hey, it seems email can only go to the Inbox, The Feed or The Paper Trail.

So for now, I’ve either got more features, or more confusion. Yet to be determined which that is.

People Pages

Hey has a concept of people pages where you can see everything that relates to a single individual.

MailMate has me covered quite well here although it doesn’t look as pretty as what Hey has achieved.

You will note from the image of my MailMate sidebar above that I have a People Pages folder. When I expand that, MailMate shows me a folder for each individual sender. Click any of those and only email from that person shows in the main window. The image below shows this, with disguised names for privacy reasons.

With that, I’ve got a focused view of each person as well.

2020-06-17: I have created an addendum to this post, providing some more detail as to how to create the People Pages smart mailbox.

Attachments

Hey surfaces attachments and looks to do a great job of this.

I am sure that MailMate can do some kind of filtering based on attachment content, but I couldn’t figure out a combination that would get this to work effectively⁴.

However, SaneBox offers the option to connect to a cloud storage provider and save email attachments to a folder in that storage. Optionally, it can strip the attachments from the original email.

I created a connection to OneDrive and now SaneBox is saving email attachments there. To enhance search even further, I’m indexing that folder in DEVONthink which unlocks the myriad ways of searching and surfacing that DEVONthink offers, while keeping everything neatly in a folder structure.

Fastmail also offers the ability to save attachments to its storage space. I chose OneDrive because I wanted sync to my local drive. OneDrive was the best option as I have the most storage with it, and I’m off Dropbox now that their client has become bloat-ware. That’s not to say the OneDrive client for Mac is good - it isn’t. If only iCloud Drive was an option…

Stickies, Notes and Renaming Threads

Hey has me beat here. I haven’t identified a way to create notes against single emails. However this has never been a problem for me in the past. I use a combination of OmniFocus/Drafts/NotePlan to make notes and this is working for me.

The renaming of a thread is nice too, but again, not something I’ve ever felt the need for.

Summary

In summary, I think Hey is great. I wish them every success. If it offered the ability to work with my existing infrastructure, I’d be tempted. But as it is now the service isn’t right for me.

Yet the workflow is solid. By replicating the structure with the combination of tools that I already own/subscribe to I can benefit from the method of work, without the prettiness. I’m okay with that.

2020 wasn’t meant to be this way. I have distinct memories of working in government when up-beat policy visions with ambitious names like Towards 2020 and 2020: A Forecast of our Future were being pumped out¹. These reports all had a commonality in that 2020 was guaranteed to be great! As long as we did whatever the document was promoting, from its publish date to 2020, things would be brilliant.

We must have failed miserably because 2020 is a shit show. On this I think we can all agree.

It is within this environment, that today I celebrate(?) my 43rd birthday. Honestly though, I’m happy enough to simply celebrate being alive. There have been more worthy souls than I that have had the fortune that I’ve experienced to avoid the range of ways that 2020 is trying to rain death upon us.

Actually, that’s unfair to a poor defenceless year. 2020 has nothing against us specifically. Rather we are the architects of our own doom. Whether it be through improper health controls allowing coronavirus to gain a foothold in China, or countries demonstrating a lack of leadership and coordination to corral a community towards effective COVID-19 transmission prevention, or racist hatred leading to people being killed for the skin they’re born with, we have created this 2020. This is our reality - not the one that was promoted in the glossy policy brochures in 2003.

And I haven’t even mentioned climate change. That doozy is still out there and I don’t see our humanity rising to face that challenge in a coordinated way anytime soon. The worst is yet to come.

A good thing about the past year has been that I have figured out who I am. No more am I self-conscious about the person I am or the way I think and perceive the world. I’m sure this realisation comes to others sooner but for me it has been this 42nd year that has provided me with the answers to my own universe². This discovery has unlocked confidence in my approach to the world around me. I’ve overcome most vestiges of introversion shyness (except phone calls, I still hate them). Now at 43 years old I feel fully-formed with the confidence to deal with and respond to things I understand, the wisdom to learn about things I don’t, and the confidence to defer to experts without fear of appearing incompetent.

In turning 43 it’s not about me anymore. More importantly I’ve got two kids - aged 8 and 4 - and they are growing into a world that needs changing. I’ve been unsuccessful in making that change happen. Life is a lottery and I didn’t win the “become a leader of a country” prize. Look at who did and it appears obvious that it often relies on luck ahead of competence, intelligence or desire.

So this final statement I address to my children, and all the others in generations younger than my own. I wish that when you reach your own 43rd birthdays that you have the opportunity to look over the history of your own lives and the society you’re in that you can see positive world change.

Just remember that as you’re working on all of your Towards 2050 vision statements, that it doesn’t mean shit if you don’t take the hard steps towards enacting the change. Learn from us.

The developers of Civilization 6 - and specifically Aspyr who are responsible for the Mac port - have cost me time and money, but have provided me with a sense of satisfaction from being able to complete a new IT project.

The latest update to the Civ franchise was deployed to the PC version of the game but not macOS (or Linux). As a result when I tried to play an online game with my friends, no dice. The two versions are now incompatible with one another. Aspyr has said nothing about an ETA for a Mac update.

Proof of Concept

I enjoy playing online games with my friends. I enjoy it enough that I was willing to use Boot Camp on my iMac to create a native Windows partition. Boot Camp is annoying in that it only works with internal drives. This had me kicking myself that I saved myself some money when I customised my iMac build - selecting just a 256Gb internal SSD. Ah, hindsight. I definitely should have paid the excessive money for the bigger drive.

Anyway, I pared down my files, offloading some to my ThunderBay RAID enclosure, and deleting some others so I had enough to create a Windows partition. The Boot Camp system worked well enough, and I was able to install Steam on it, then the PC version of Civ and have a good gaming night with my friends.

External and Better

In the cold light of the next day, though, I knew this was an unsustainable solution. By partitioning my internal SSD I had two Operating Systems neither of which had enough breathing space on their respective drives to be happy.

By some strange twist of fate and timing, this very same morning my RSS feed contained the exact article I needed to read. Riccardo Mori published an article, one part of which included details of his transition to being a part-time Windows user. He wrote:

For the past eight days or so, I’ve been using my iMac booted into Windows 10 in the Boot Camp installation I managed to perform on an external SSD.

Hang on. That’s what I want to do. How did he do it? I fired off a tweet:

@morrick In relation to your latest blog, how did you install Boot Camp Windows on an external drive? I was battling with this issue yesterday, and was forced to partition my too small internal SSD. If there’s a guide you used, I’d appreciate a link. Thanks!

— andrewcanion (@andrewcanion) May 25, 2020

and Riccardo responded rapidly:

It’s a bit of a convoluted process I suggest not to carry out in a hurry. In this post I talk about the guide I followed, with several annotations of my own. I hope it helps: https://t.co/xRh4c6erU8

— Riccardo Mori (@morrick) May 25, 2020

Note that he provided a link to a previous article of his that provides insight into how to fool Boot Camp into thinking it’s installing to an internal drive, when it’s actually an external SSD in use.

I trucked off to my local Officeworks store and bought myself a 500Gb USB-C connected SSD drive.

I followed along with the steps outlined by Riccardo and the other source material - a slightly out-of-date article written by OWC (incidentally the manufacturers of my aforementioned ThunderBay drive array).

You’re Not Successful Yet, Mate

Things went well, until they didn’t. I was on the home stretch as Windows was doing the first part of the install onto the SSD. I forgot the next step though - which was to stop the installation at its reboot point (part of the ‘fooling BootCamp’ process). I realised too late, and so I had to quit the installation and start over.

That created a new problem. The SSD now had a number of NTFS partitions on it, but macOS apparently cannot reinitialise a drive with a very small boot partition such as the one that Windows 10 puts on the drive. Turns out the resolution, as is often the case, is found from the command line. I give credit to Priyank Sharma for detailing precisely how to eliminate this partition problem and get the drive back to a point where I could start over by reinitialising it. Before finding his post, I was worried I had turned my new SSD drive into a small and inelegant paperweight.

Drive restored, I started over, this time remembering to follow all the steps.

Success, With Thanks to the Open Web

I now have an iMac that has its full 256Gb internal SSD to itself for macOS, and a 500Gb external SSD with Windows 10 - what I can now refer to as my ‘gaming rig’.

The thing that amazes me is that USB-C appears essentially fast enough to facilitate an operating system’s data throughput requirements.

It’s also so great that people document their experiences on blogs across the internet. Without the three articles I have referenced, none of this would have happened. This is what the open web is all about, and why it is so much better than Facebook, et al.

The last step in this process is to now wait for a time when my friends want to play Civ again. Come on guys, I’m ready!