https://www.wired.com/story/apple-threatens-basecamp-email-app/

David Heinmeier Hansson remembers the moment he decided he was fed up with email. It was two years ago, and Hansson, the cofounder and CTO of Basecamp, was working with fellow cofounder Jason Fried on the company’s tool for managing customer relationships. Basecamp makes project management and communication software, and Hansson realized what he wanted wasn’t necessarily a better version of those apps but, more simply, a better email app. “I send and receive at least a hundred emails a day and do all these silly hacks of marking things as unread, making sure I get back to it later, hunting and pecking for it near the end of the day,” Hansson says. “That process just needed to be better.”

So the Basecamp execs tasked a small R&D team with building a new email app. They called it Hey. Nine months ago, Hansson started using Hey full-time, running it alongside Gmail and Apple Mail to compare the experiences. On Monday, Hey launched to a limited number of users. It’s centered around something called the Imbox rather than the inbox—the idea being it’s a place for important or immediate emails. Each email from a first-time sender has to be accepted into your Imbox first or be forever cast away as clutter. The app’s layout is clean (then again, it’s a brand-new inbox) and has the slickness of a modern web dashboard rather than the bloat of an antiquated email app. It also costs $99 per year, which immediately eliminates a certain portion of the population who have accepted their ad-filled but free email fates.