Happy Wednesday!

Jamis

and I are prepping a change that will allow all HEY customers to not only forward email in but also send email out from external accounts. That means you'll be able to compose emails from you@hotmail.com and reply to messages forwarded into that account via the HEY interface.

Internally, we've been calling this "Rogue Mode," but customers will know it as "Forwarding & SMTP Setup."

Note that we're soft-launching this at first. This will give us a chance for people to discover the feature more slowly and fix problems before announcing it broadly.

Here's how it works:

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Under Account Setup, we've renamed "Forwarding Setup" to "Forwarding & SMTP Setup." For customers who haven't yet set up forwarding, they'll see a new blank slate that communicates they'll be able to both Forward and Send with HEY:

Clicking "Connect an address" will begin walking you through the full setup process. First, we walk everyone through a quick FAQ to answer a few common questions:

From here, it follows a process similar to our HEY for Work setup:

After you enter your email address, we run a quick MX Record check in the background to see if your email provider allows you to send out via SMTP. Why? Because Google (more on this later).

Once we check MX Records, we show you Forwarding instructions, give you a chance to make those changes on your side, and complete the Forwarding step:

Now that you've configured Forwarding, we give you a choice: Enable sending via SMTP or calling it done at forwarding:

If you skip SMTP setup, you're taken back to the index and you're all done. Otherwise, we continue the flow:

Depending on your provider (iCloud, Outlook, Yahoo, etc.), we show different instructions for your password:

Finally, we confirm everything and reiterate that you're good to go:

Now, when you visit the Index again, you'll see each of your forwarding & sending accounts listed out:

After setting everything up, you can still make changes. By clicking "Edit," you'll be able to review the forwarding instructions again, add your SMTP details (or change the ones you already added), and delete the forwarding account altogether:

Once you've enabled SMTP on one or more of your external accounts, they'll appear in the FROM pulldown menu the next time you go to compose a new message or reply to an existing thread:

Because forwarding addresses are scoped to individual HEY accounts (not your entire Identity), you'll only see some of your "send as" accounts in the FROM field for replies. The same is true today: You can't reply to an email to david@basecamp.com FROM david@hey.com — it would break the thread.

We've downplayed forwarding email OUT of HEY a bit with this release. Customers will now find the link to add/delete outbound forwarding at the bottom of the Index:

Unfortunately, Google has announced they are dropping basic SMTP support in favor of a more complex "kiss-the-ring" process that may include their audit & approval. Because of this, we've made the decision not to support sending via SMTP for Gmail and Google-hosted accounts.

That's a bummer for many customers who were looking forward to being able to reply to forwarded email with their @gmail.com addresses... Ultimately, we believe in open standards (like SMTP) and have chosen to avoid building a separate auth system for Gmail + HEY customers.

Forwarding in from Gmail/Google will continue to work just fine. We will just stop you before the SMTP step and send you back to the Index when you click "Done."

This change touched the sending & receiving machinery all over HEY. And while we've tested this a lot, there may be some weirdness. Please let me or

Jamis

know if customers report anything out of the ordinary, including:

Thanks again to

Conor

and

Zach

for smoothing this out on iOS and to

Jay

for help on the Android side. And to

Michael

for testing it all (again and again).

We'll post and update in the comments when this goes live.

—

Jamis

&

Scott