Hey, and Fastmail, and the app store

Okay, here’s my second blog post for today, this time about email (mostly). The guys who make Basecamp introduced a new email product, called Hey, about a week ago. I was kind of curious about it, since I like the Basecamp guys, generally speaking, and have used their products before. (I was a big user of their Backpack product for several years.) Anyway, it’s interesting, but not for me. It’s $99 a year and really wouldn’t be as good for me as Fastmail is, and that only costs $50/year.

But then there was a big kerfuffle when they tried to release a new version of their iOS client to the app store. Apple rejected it, for reasons explained here. Basically, Apple wants them to add an in-app purchase for subscriptions, thereby giving Apple a cut of their subscription revenue. Which they don’t want to do. DHH went on a bit of a Twitter rant over this. I think that he’s mostly right, though it’s not as simple an issue as some people would make it out to be.

This whole thing got me worried that, if Apple is going to go after Hey for subscription revenue, they might go after Fastmail too. I haven’t seen any indication that they’ve done that yet, but I’m concerned that, if they do, Fastmail will have to increase prices to take Apple’s cut into account. Or they could just discontinue their iOS client. Either way, it wouldn’t be good for me.

So that got me to go over to Fastmail’s blog and see if they had weighed in on it. They haven’t, but I did notice a blog post announcing their support for labels. So that’s cool. I had used labels in Gmail, and having to switch to folders was kind of a bummer for me. So if you’ve been thinking about migrating from Gmail to Fastmail, that’s one less thing to worry about. I can’t decide if I want to switch back to labels now that I’ve got everything working with folders, but I’m considering it. Fastmail has also revamped their rules system recently, and I’m liking that too.

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