HEY, Ho, Let's Not Go
This has been sitting around in my drafts folder for about a month, so it’s long past time to get it out there.
HEY (they always capitalise it, which I don’t care for) is a new email service from Basecamp, makers of fine (I’m told) collaboration software for teams. The video walkthrough lasts about half an hour, but/and gives you a good overview of what it’s like.
Hey was also in the news recently over the way Apple was treating it regarding App Store rules. Apple were clearly in the wrong, and things have been sorted out now.
But that’s all another story. I want to talk about Hey, and why I think it is bad for users. Even at the same time that it’s probably good for users. A company, a service, can — like a person — contain multitudes.
The Good
If you watch that video you’ll see that Hey looks like an unusually interesting and capable email client: good for organising mail, getting the unimportant stuff out of your way until you want to look at it, and making the important things highly visible. It’s both powerful at automatically helping the user, and attractive to look at.
The Bad
But it’s built on a proprietary platform. Email’s biggest strength since its invention has been that it was built on open standards. Whether you were using a Unix command-line client at a university in the early days, or Gmail, Outlook, or another IMAP provider today — none of that matters. If you know someone’s email address, you can contact them, and they you. And more importantly for this discussion: if you want to use different email client software, you can.
That’s because email is built on open protocols: SMTP, POP, and IMAP. Not that you have to understand those – or even know about them – to use email, any more than you have to understand an internal combustion engine to drive a car.
More importantly, if you want to change from one email provider to another, you can do so. This is harder than it should be because the culture of people having their own domain never really caught on. All those josmith1989@gmail.com and hazy_harriet@hotmail.com type of addresses could, instead, have been jo@josmith1989.net and harri@hazyharriet.org.
They still could be, in fact. And when they are, then you can change the underlying email provider without anyone other than yourself having to know or care. To take a not-made-up example, martin@devilgate.org used to go by a complex combination of Gmail (for the spam filtering and search) and 5quidhost.co.uk and its eventual purchaser, TSOHost, because that’s what I used for web hosting, as much as anything else. But a few years ago I switched it to Fastmail. No-one I correspond with had to know anything about the change.
But Hey’s email service does not use the open protocols — principally IMAP — that makes all that possible. Instead they have their own proprietary system. If you move your email into Hey’s service, you might not find it too easy to move it out again.
Secondly, right now they don’t support custom domains, so your correspondents will certainly have to know. While josmith@hey.com might be available right now, if they have any success we’ll soon be back to appending birth years or random numbers to the end of common names, just like on Gmail, Hotmail, etc. Though they have said they intend to support custom domains, so there’s scope for a better solution there.
The Alternatives
Andrew Canion had the same thought I did when I watched the video: you can do most of this in MailMate.1 At least the viewing, the ‘The Feed’ kind of thing. Though he had the added experience of using SaneBox to automatically file and sort your emails.
Andrew also went further than I did: instead of just thinking, ‘I could do that with MailMate,’ he went ahead and did it, and documented the process (with a tiny bit of help from yours truly).
I had heard of SaneBox through its sponsoring of various podcasts, so I was familiar with the idea, but I hadn’t tried it. I’m now trying it out, along with some of Andrew’s suggestions, and it’s altogether a pretty good setup. Now, all that comes into my main inbox — the only things that appear on unread counts, and hence activate icon badges — are actual emails that I want to see. All the newsletters, receipts, confirmations, and other stuff that isn’t spam but that I don’t want appearing in my inbox, and especially in my unread count — those are all there, but tidily away in other mailboxes, where I can deal with them at my leisure.
That said, SaneBox is not free (though it’s cheaper than Hey), and I don’t get that much annoying email. So I don’t think I’ll continue with this exact setup when the free trial ends. But it’s worth knowing that there are good ways — and standards-compliant ways — to achieve similar functionality to Hey’s.
We Built This City on IMAP
What this all shows is that there’s nothing in Hey’s service that you couldn’t create by building on top of IMAP, except the user interface – and that doesn’t have to know about the underlying protocols in any case. It’s possible that is exactly what they have done: implemented it on top of IMAP. In fact, doing anything else would mean giving themselves a lot of extra work, as they would have to effectively reinvent IMAP in any case.
If I were going to build a service like Hey, I’d start with an off-the-shelf IMAP service, probably open source, and build the filtering rules and all that around it.
So I hope that’s what they have done, and that at some point in the future they make their service available to ordinary email clients via IMAP.
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And probably plenty of other mail clients. ↩︎
The Angel of the Crows by Katherine Addison (Books 2020, 19)
I read about this in a Tor.com article about the use of Jack the Ripper in fiction. It’s a story set in Victorian times, about two men living Baker Street in London; one a detective, the other a doctor.
But the detective is an angel, called Crow; and the doctor is JH Doyle, recently back from Afghanistan, where he was injured in an encounter with one of the Fallen. And someone is murdering women in Whitechapel.
In other words, it’s an interesting riff on the Sherlock Holmes stories. The hunt for the Ripper is spread through the whole book, while some of the well-known cases have versions interspersed. The Sign of the Four appears, Baskerville Hall is visited. When someone dies and the only visible wound is twin puncture marks, was it a snake, as in ‘The Speckled Band,’ or a vampire?
Because most of the creatures of myth and legend exist in this London, often with an unusual twist. James Moriarty can’t enter your home unless you invite him. But werewolves are respected landlords.
Vampires can enter public buildings, of course: “Any building with an angel.” Angels only have consciousness and names – names are important – if they are attached to a public building. Churches and synagogues have their angels, obviously; but so too do pubs, hotels, and stations. The angel of King’s Cross makes an appearance.
But not the angel I was half expecting. The Angel, Islington is a pub,1 and we’d have to refer to its angel as ‘The Angel of the Angel, Islington,’ which would be weird and unwieldy.
Speaking of language, the Victorianism is handled pretty well, I think, but the author is American, and it shows where a few terms creep in. ‘Sidewalk’ instead of ‘pavement’; ‘baseboard’ instead of ‘skirting board.’ ‘Row houses’ where we would say ’terraced houses.’ ‘Sundown.’ ‘Paper folded into fourths’; a British writer would say ‘quarters.’
These are mildly jarring, but not that important. Certainly not enough to detract from the fun of the story overall.
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Sadly now a Wetherspoons. #NeverSpoons. ↩︎
The growth of email newsletters over the last few years has been interesting. But they have a major problem, compared to blogs.
That is, once they’ve been sent out, the author can’t fix typos. Other errors can be corrected in later issues, but typos are out there forever.
Surface Detail by Iain M Banks (Books 2020, 18)
The second-last Culture book, and a long-delayed return to Mr Banks. This book is ten years old, and I didn’t write about it in 2010. Not sure why, but I didn’t post much in 2010.
Anyway, this is pure dead brilliant. Even better than I remembered – and I, as is common, remembered surprisingly little.
But you don’t need me to tell you about it. It’s a Culture book. Just read the damn thing.
The Latest Tory Plan to Attack the NHS
This is terrifying:
The prime minister has set up a taskforce to devise plans for how ministers can regain much of the direct control over the NHS they lost in 2012 under a controversial shake-up masterminded by Andrew Lansley, the then coalition government health secretary.
The Prime Minister’s Health and Social Care Taskforce – made up of senior civil servants and advisers from Downing Street, the Treasury and the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) – is drawing up proposals that would restrict NHS England’s operational independence and the freedom Stevens has to run the service.
– Denis Campbell in The Guardian, Boris Johnson plans radical shake-up of NHS in bid to regain more direct control
Looks like Johnson’s life-saving hospital stay has been soon forgotten.
On a not-unrelated note to my last, Colin Devroe wrote this last month:
All pop-ups on page visit should be blocked. I don’t care if you’re giving me 100% off, I don’t want to see the pop-up. No, wait, how about only if you’re giving me 100% off is it OK to show me a pop-up. Thanks.
Colin Devroe, Untitled
I agree 100%.
We’re currently watching Borgen, or the Danish West Wing, as I like to think of it. It’s really good. Just about to start season 3, and slightly sad that this is the last one.
The Adventures of Luther Arkwright and Heart of Empire by Bryan Talbot (Books 2020, 16 & 17)
I suppose I could have counted this as four books, since the first part is in three volumes. A reread of a great set of graphic novels about the timestream-jumping psychic adventurer, and (then) his offspring.
Well worth checking out if you haven’t, and if the above description sounds like your sort of thing.
A Reply From the Masks Petition
That’s interesting. I don’t think I’ve had a reply like this from a UK parliament petition before:
Dear Martin McCallion,
You recently signed the petition “Make it mandatory to wear a face mask in public during Covid-19 Pandemic”: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/304397
The Petitions Committee (the group of MPs who oversee the petitions system) have considered the Government’s response to this petition. They felt that the response did not directly address the request of petition and have therefore written back to the Government to ask them to provide a revised response.
When the Committee have received a revised response from the Government, this will be published on the website and you will receive an email. If you would not like to receive further updates about this petition, you can unsubscribe below.
Thanks,
The Petitions team
UK Government and Parliament
– The Petitions team, Make it mandatory to wear a face mask in public during Covid-19 Pandemic
That’s from the one I linked to a week ago.
It’ll be interesting to see if we get anything more back. In the meantime, it’s still at just over 14,000 signatures: keep signing.
And keep wearing a mask.
The Monster (Wear a Mask!)
Dr Sayed Tabatabai writes beautifully about the horror of working in an ICU at the moment.
Sometimes when people sound quieter and calmer during a respiratory issue it’s a sign of impending doom.
You can’t make noise if you can’t breathe.
– Dr Sayed Tabatabai, The Monster
Go read. It’s a Twitter thread. Only 22 tweets. ThreadReaderApp doesn’t seem to be working.
And please: start wearing a face covering if you ever go out.
The Cold War Never Ended
Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt and Michael Schwirtz, writing in the New York Times:
American intelligence officials have concluded that a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops — amid the peace talks to end the long-running war there, according to officials briefed on the matter.
– Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt and Michael Schwirtz, Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says
The Cold War continues. And Trump’s on the Russian side of it:
The intelligence finding was briefed to President Trump, and the White House’s National Security Council discussed the problem at an interagency meeting in late March, the officials said. Officials developed a menu of potential options — starting with making a diplomatic complaint to Moscow and a demand that it stop, along with an escalating series of sanctions and other possible responses, but the White House has yet to authorize any step, the officials said.
– Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt and Michael Schwirtz, Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says
Tell Them to Tell Us to Wear a Mask
The government has already replied to this petition, but it’s still worth signing if, like me, you think people should be wearing masks in public:
Make it mandatory to wear a face mask in public during Covid-19 Pandemic
‘My mask protects you, your mask protects me.’ It’s the public-spirited thing to do, but most of the public aren’t doing it. The least the government could do is to encourage it.
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal el-Mohtar and Max Gladstone (Books 2020, 15)
This has won all the awards, and rightly so. Or not quite all: it’s a finalist for the Hugo novella award. At the time of writing, we don’t know whether or not it will win.
Unless I’ve travelled downthread and found out.
It’s a novella, which may be the perfect length of story, in some sense. It’s a love story across time and space and multiple parallel existences… It’s pure dead brilliant.
The actual nature of the war, of the sides, even of the protagonists, Red and Blue, is ambiguous at best. But that doesn’t matter because the writing is so exquisite.
The Wikipedia article describes it as an epistolary novel. That’s only partly true, and not just because it’s a novella. The letters are there, and are fundamental, but I feel that to be truly ’epistolary,’ the whole story must be told in letters, and that is not the case here. But that doesn’t matter.
One minor oddity I alluded to above: The future is referred to as ‘downthread’ and the past ‘upthread.’ That seems the wrong way round to me, but maybe it reflects the fact that, normally, we can’t stop sliding down into the future.
Go. Get. Read. VVG. They’re adapting it for TV. I can’t quite imagine what that will look like, but I’m keen to find out.
Friday by Robert A Heinlein (Books 2020, 14)
Friday Baldwin is genetically engineered ‘artificial person.’ Indistinguishable from a conventional human, she nonetheless is psychologically constrained by the way her society discriminates against her type.
That’s pretty much her only constraint, though. Her engineered nature also gives her enhanced strength, reflexes, sight, hearing, and smell, as well as genius-level intelligence. She starts out as a courier and soon becomes a fugitive.
This stands up pretty well, all these years since I first read it. The fragmented, Balkanised future North America is interesting. Easy travel everywhere by ’tubes,’ which are presumably underground trains, and suborbital rockets. Corruption so pervasive that the characters don’t even notice it. You hand over your passport with ’the appropriate squeeze’ folded inside it, and are waved through.
You Are Your Thoughts (I Think)
Quiet Thoughts
Colin Walker links to a post by Julian Summerhayes1 about silence:
You see, I’m missing the silence of early lockdown.
No, I’m really missing it.
I can’t say everything’s back to normal but as soon as I step outside, BOOM, there it is! That infernal, torrid background noise, cars everywhere (the air smells dirty) and it’s like nothing ever happened.
– Julian Summerhayes, A quiet space
I can relate. I haven’t noticed the increased noise yet, but I have been enjoying much about lockdown, and the general quietness of things, especially when I sit out in the garden, is part of that. As is the cleaner air here in London.
Unthinkable Thoughts
But Julian goes on to say something that just seems so bizarre, so alien to me, that I can scarcely comprehend it:
But when you realise that you’re not your thoughts, notwithstanding the apparent hold they have over us, and see that they flow naturally much like my beloved River Dart and there’s nothing we can do to orientate them one way or the other, life becomes a lot easier.
– Julian Summerhayes, A quiet space
Emphasis very much mine. We are not our thoughts? I can’t help but think that there’s a missing pair of words in that sentence: ’nothing if':
… you’re nothing if not your thoughts…
Now that makes a lot more sense to me. If we are not our thoughts, then what are we? If our thoughts are not us, then who is doing the thinking?
People sometimes use phrasing like, ‘My brain told me to…’, which raises the same question: you are your brain, surely? If not, then what? We are our whole bodies, certainly, and perception and experience encompass all of our physiology, not just our brains. But the brain is the seat of consciousness, and we are conscious beings.
Perhaps – just possibly – people are making a distinction between brain and mind. Maybe that would make sense for the latter formulation, but I’m not convinced that’s it. And certainly it doesn’t explain Julian’s concept of thoughts. Because whether thoughts happen in the physical organ we call brain, or the somewhat more metaphysical and amorphous mind: thoughts are what we are.
In Other Heads
Or so it seems to me. But I shouldn’t dismiss alternative perceptions. Over the last few months I’ve heard several conversations on podcasts, and read a couple of articles, about the different ways people’s brains/minds/psyches/consciousnesses work.
There is aphantasia, which names the fact that some people do not form images in their minds. They have no ‘mind’s eye,’ in effect. Just yesterday I read an article about it and severely deficient autobiographical memory, or SDAM, which seems to be related.
There has also been talk about whether or not we think in words. That can get confusing when people with different experiences discuss ’the voice in your head.’ One will ask something like, ‘Whose voice is it?’ The answer – from my perspective – is that the voice in my head is my thoughts. That’s how I think. Hmm, except when I think in pictures, as I’m not aphantasic (aphantastic?)
It’s hard to talk about these ideas in ways that someone whose experience is dramatically different will understand. And I find it surprising that we are so different. I wonder if we are just hitting the limitations of language (of English, at least). Maybe people’s experiences are not that different, but it’s just so hard to describe what goes on inside your own head in a way that is meaningful inside someone else’s head.
Or not. After all, some people do hear voices in their heads which appear not to be their own. We generally categorise those people as having a mental illness, and sometimes medication changes their mental experience. And of course psychoactive drugs cause us to have experiences in our own heads that are different from our normal state, so it’s clear that thoughts and perceptions are at least partly chemical.
This is all both fascinating and confusing, and I have no conclusions about it.
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And fascinating to learn that someone is still using LiveJournal. Good to know. ↩︎
Assignment in Eternity vols 1 & 2 by Robert A Heinlein (Books 2020, 12 & 13)
I should probably start a special tag for all this Heinlein rereading I’m doing (I have another one in progress). These books are so short that they hardly count as one novel between them, never mind each, but I’m counting them as two because I have two physically separate books.
Plus they’re not only not one novel, they’re not even two. They are, in fact, four stories – the longest no more than a novella – loosely connected by the idea that humans don’t use all of their brain power, and we could do incredible things if we did.
Oh, and an early analysis of what it is to be human, and whether human rights should be accorded to uplifted intelligent animals.
All in all, a good enough, if slight, set of stories.
It’s funny when you hear the DJ on BBC 6Music saying, ‘I borrowed some records from the John Peel Archive’; and then you realise it’s Tom Ravenscroft. ‘I got some records from my dad’s collection’ doesn’t sound quite so… distinguished.
Site Update
As you might notice if you look around here, I’ve made some changes to the layout and presentation of the site. Nothing very dramatic, but the header and sidebar look a bit different.
I’m open to – and seeking – constructive criticism. How does it look? Is anything misaligned, or confusingly laid out, or hard to find?
Let me know in the comments, or on Twitter.