
Basecamp’s founders are trying to start an email rebellion - tosh
https://www.protocol.com/hey-email
======
rossdavidh
"Three months into the pandemic, the argument about the moral and economic
superiority of the modern office is over. Remote work works."

So, I have worked (mostly) remotely for years, and I don't think I agree with
this. It works for some people, in some situations. There are absolutely times
when you need to be in the office with other people, and even if my client is
in another town I have to drive over there to talk to people in person.

This from a person who works one of the most remote-friendly jobs (computer
programmer), who is obviously not opposed to the idea because I do it myself
most of the time. But I think what a lot of people discovered is that working
remotely _doesn't_ work.

It probably also works worse over time, as the personal contacts made in
person, fray after a longer and longer period without in-office conversations.
I would not be surprised if some companies, currently paying sky-high salaries
for employees in very high cost of living areas, find it attractive to enable
more remote work. If and where it works, great. But the idea that everyone
will do it in the future, is just fantasy.

~~~
gregd
I've worked remotely now for just shy of 10 years in a row and more like 15
years total out of a 25 year IT career.

I have found the biggest hurdles to remote work usually boil down to one
thing, your clients or employer and fellow employees, who still "go into" an
office, need to buy into the remote worker situation. This usually entails
wrapping their heads around fewer meetings (even adhoc ones) and utilizing
online tools exclusively...namely Slack, Teams, Skype, etc.

What has helped tremendously is that since most companies adopted a sudden and
an across the board "work from home" policy, it's forced collaboration via
different avenues. Those of us who already worked from home, now are included
in meetings and discussions that we would normally be left out of because our
face wasn't physically in an office.

I'm hopeful that we'll see a broader adoption rate even for those that still
like the physical office, will be able to work from home on an as wanted
basis..sick kid....sick spouse...deliveries expected...plumbing needs
fixed..etc.

~~~
Angostura
I've found that the biggest problem was missing those things that got
discussed informally around the office.

There would be interesting problems you could solve, but you rarely heard
about them.

~~~
Twirrim
I've become quite adept over the years at building up contacts across
different parts of the business org, just through quick "water cooler" chats
with people I meet while I'm making a cuppa. I'll even go to a different floor
from time to time just to expose me to more people. The convenience factor of
"Hi, how are you doing?" turning in to a little bit more of a conversation, in
a circumstance when I know I'm not disturbing them in the middle of something.
I don't get that with Slack etc.

I'm really enjoying a bunch of the aspects of working from home, and picking
up a strong preference for it, but I can't help but wonder about the impact
less casual contact with other teams is having on overall performance. There's
a lot you can get solved, much faster, by having friendly contacts all over
the place (which of course, you have to be careful not to abuse or they'll
stop being friendly contacts).

That applies both to problems I'm dealing with, and problems they're dealing
with that we'd never know about under other circumstances.

~~~
rossdavidh
All excellent points, and all things which I would expect to become gradually
bigger problems over time, as the "water cooler" info you compiled, becomes
less and less current.

------
agd
This is quite an innovative approach to email, and they describe the features
here: [https://hey.com/features/](https://hey.com/features/)

\- screening by default

\- removes email tracking pixels

\- streamlined reply/read flows

\- improved attachment handling

\- doesn't interrupt you by default

There's also a video tour of the product from the CEO here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=296&v=UCeYTysLyG...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=296&v=UCeYTysLyGI)

For me as a gmail user I'm keen to try this out.

~~~
heliodor
A lot of the features advertised by HEY have been sorely missing from Gmail
for a long time. I wouldn't exactly call them innovative. Gmail will have an
easy time implementing these features, now that someone is kicking them out of
their decade-long slumber.

Plenty of people will be happy to pay for a quality and not-Google email
service. Glad to see they have the resources and willpower to do this!

~~~
svachalek
Google had an innovative email platform called Inbox that was widely loved by
its users and they killed it two years ago. If the market is not billions of
people they just don't care about it.

~~~
1123581321
I loved Inbox, but what actually happened there was that there were two
visions of Gmail 2.0 internally. Inbox didn’t win, partly because it was
written in a nightmarish C++ framework, but some of its best features were
brought into Gmail.

Gmail is a conservatively managed product, but it does improve over time.

~~~
andolanra
Nobody I know who used Inbox feels that the current Gmail interface—even with
some Inbox features backported—is an acceptable substitute for Inbox.

~~~
rocha
Have you tried the Simplify GMail browser extension? It made the transition
from Inbox to GMail less painful to me.

[https://simpl.fyi/](https://simpl.fyi/)

~~~
morberg
That looks quite nice. Is there an alternative for Safari?

------
godzillabrennus
I’m disappointed in Hey so far.

It’s a closed system (no IMAP).

They are charging a premium price for it over Fastmail or Google Gsuite.

There is no calendar.

No ability to import old emails into it.

Seems like they could have just released a mail app sitting on top of Fastmail
and had more/better features from day one.

~~~
dhagz
I don't get how they can complain about Google stifling innovation in an open
system since 2004 and then close off their counter-offering by not offering
IMAP.

I'm gonna stick with running my own mail server to get around Gmail. It's $5 a
month, has a calendar, I can use any mail app I want to, I could import old
emails if I cared to. I'm also sure I could get the "tracking pixel name-n-
shame" feature they're so excited about if I took some time to write some in-
depth filters.

~~~
jedieaston
The feature set would be extremely difficult to clone via IMAP + SMTP without
being confusing. One of the major features is that you can change the subject
that is displayed on an incoming email, and that it won't be changed when you
respond (so if someone sent you an email with "no subject" as the subject, you
can change it to "foo bar foo". They will still see "no subject" when you
reply, and conversations won't be broken in Outlook). That'd be very hard to
clone in an arbitrary email client that didn't know how to fix it. Another one
is that every unique sender gets put into a screening folder until you tell
hey where to put it (inbox/paper trail/feed), and that functionality can't be
cloned in a email client (because they don't know how to force you to answer
that question).

Even if they found a way to make it work now, every time they had a new
feature they wanted to add to their web client, they'd have to worry about
making it not break Outlook/Thunderbird/$RandomEmacsMailClient, because if it
does people are going to miss emails and leave the service. And since their
target market is people who hate the way email works today anyway, the target
market probably won't ever want to touch IMAP again if they can help it. If
they want to go back, all their mail can be exported and new mail will be
forwarded to their next address. It seems fine to me.

~~~
6510
> every unique sender gets put into a screening folder

I just set up a gmail filter to have everything skip the inbox. Adding
exceptions is not so convenient but it works.

------
las3r
The pricing is more than steep. For that amount I can also buy an office 365
subscription which doesn't sell my data, and gives me access to all the
desktop tools. I mean I'm willing to spend for this for a private mail address
with a new way of working (I could even live without imap), but I can't
justify these costs.

~~~
holstvoogd
Yeah, 99$ seems like to much for me. I currently pay ~24€ for secure private
email hosting in the EU. Not so many fancy features, but it does include a
entire gsuite clone

~~~
sixhobbits
Which provider is this? Sounds like what I'm looking for.

~~~
holstvoogd
Mailbox.org They are based in berlin, price scales with storage usage iirc

~~~
msh
I also use them. Their plans start at 1 euro a month. Works fine but once in a
while my mail client gets login errors that go away after 5-10 min.

------
heavymark
They mentioned that Gmail, Apple, and others don't do anything to stop you
from getting emailed from people you don't want to hear from, but this new
tool does. I've only gotten a probably less than 10 spam messages in the past
decade, they all go into Spam. I check spam every once in a while for the
occasional time there is a false positive, but otherwise requires no action
from me. Vs basecamp approach which is more akin to having every first time
email sender go to a spam folder (screener), where I have to manually approve
or deny it. Unless I'm missing something that sounds like an incredible amount
of work, vs the spam feature of Gmail and others. Yes you only have to do it
once per sender, but most all the spam in my spam folder is always from unique
email addresses so would be a nightmare with this tool. And even if they still
have a seperate spam system, then all the normal emails I'd have to manually
approve. Eek. And they are asking you to switch to a "hey" email which is a
major ask for most of us who maybe have had our emails for a decade or more.
And that email address could go away at anytime if the system fails since hard
to imagine hey.com existing in a decade.

~~~
secondbreakfast
Have you ever been on the receiving end of a sales person's drip campaign?

~~~
antigirl
Yes and I click the Unsubscribe link if I don’t want to receive anymore emails

~~~
holstvoogd
Yeah, that works great when they make a new list each month.. I’ve had to
threaten GPDR complaints to get off lists I hadn’t even subscribed too haha

~~~
koonsolo
At that point you just mark them as spam, no?

------
niftylettuce
Just use [https://forwardemail.net](https://forwardemail.net) (I'm the
creator)

We're launching our own Gmail alternative, so if you want beta access just
toss me a message or sign up for an account on our site to get notified.

We're also a completely open and transparent startup. 100% of the source code
is open-source and 100% of our data is open.

[https://forwardemail.net/open-startup](https://forwardemail.net/open-startup)

[https://github.com/forwardemail](https://github.com/forwardemail)

~~~
msh
Are you using machine translation? The Danish version that I get by default
seems weird, not exactly bad but just weird choices of words and some
sentences.

~~~
niftylettuce
Yes, will have humans fix the machine translated versions soon!

------
leejoramo
This looks VERY good. Over 30 years, I have used/hosted/paid for all sorts of
email systems. For myself and clients

POP/IMAP/Exchange/etc.

Mutt/Eudora/Outlook/Mail.app/ThunderBird/etc/etc/etc

ISP/own servers/managed servers/Fastmail/GMail/etc

Currently, I use FastMail for my personal and my own businesses, and Gmail
with my Employer. I very much Like FastMail, but very much dislike Gmail.

Hey.com really looks like it is solving many issues with using and email
interface and workflow. Many of these issues are not solvable with standard
email servers. So I get why they are not running a plain IMAP server.

Still for myself, I would need to wait for Domain support, and at least some
sort of live sync to a IMAP server for backup.

Alternatively, maybe FastMail could layer some of these ideas on top of their
IMAP based systems. (I hold little hope of gmail improving)

~~~
mattl
They provide some kind of mbox export. I wonder if that's something that can
be hit on a crontab.

------
thibran
This is nice, but doesn't solve the real problem. Its 2020 and its really hard
to find something. Ideally there would be one place to organize/manipulate
different information/date providers and email would just be one of many.

For example: If I get a file via email, I might also have a local copy that
got updated and is newer. Part of the conversation might not have happened on
email but on [random messenger app] and on one of the many [things with a CPU]
that I own. Even with a Hey like system, the situation stays almost the same →
the user has to remember "stuff" and look-up different places to find what he
is searching for → this is sooo 1990. </rant>

~~~
mritchie712
[https://getcommande.com/](https://getcommande.com/)

------
nlitened
Anyone remembers the app called Mailbox that was acquihired by Dropbox and
killed?

God, it was so intuitive, smooth, and simple, with features I _still_ can’t
find in 2020 (like reordering the emails in the inbox). I would easily pay 200
USD a year to use that one.

~~~
seem_2211
Mailbox and Sunrise being acquired are some of the saddest losses over the
last few years. Both superior products, that would remain extremely
competitive today.

I'm extremely bitter about Sunrise in particular, because both Google and
Apple have such mediocre calendar platforms.

------
sktrdie
The founders like to market this as "not just another email client" but after
watching their intro demo it's essentially a bunch of UI changes to email
flows.

Sure there's some upfront email blockage/filtering that goes on, but that's
essentially other UI tweaks in camouflage.

I'm not saying UI isn't cool! For sure some of the things they talk about
sound interesting (like the reply later stacks at the bottom).

For the general tech-savvy people all the UI you generally need lives behind a
highly functional "search box": "give me all the email i read yesterday in the
evening"; "reply to emails I tagged with 'important' last week"; etc.

Overall I think they're trying to solve problems that are encountered by so
called "famous email addresses" (the founders most certainly fall in this
category) where your email has been sold to a bunch of lists over and over so
you really need a kind of "block this forever" kind of functionality. But how
famous are most email addresses?

In general, sure, a cool, sleek new looking UI for email, I like it!

------
floatboth
The UI is cool, but this really should be client software, not a service.

I'd rather keep my current mail host — half the price, unlimited
domains/mailboxes/storage (instead the limit is on the number of outgoing
mails per day), based in Switzerland instead of the USA.

------
parhamn
Looks great! Seems like it would make for a lovely email client as opposed to
a new closed provider.

I wonder if they’re concerned about gmail absorbing their features sorta like
they did for Inbox by Google.The key features seem to be inbox organization,
slick GUI and a whitelist.

------
dhagz
Honestly, the only thing I like from this is the tracker blocking and no
automatic footers/signatures.

But how well do they support plain-text only emails? I've been moving more and
more to plain-text as my default setting for sending emails and it's pretty
liberating. I'm also starting to read emails as plain-text first before
switching to an HTML content-type, but that's more painful.

------
chinathrow
While I am looking forward to their upcoming new service, you can't call it
"to start a rebellion" when your protocol/approach is closed: To use Hey! you
need to use the web client or their own apps.

If other providers would follow that rebellion, we would have many many
additional walled gardens.

~~~
kevmo
It's almost like it isn't a rebellion and that this is just an advertisement.

~~~
PaulHoule
Yep.

The other day the folks at Slack were accusing Microsoft of using Teams to
keep people using email and "locking users" into Outlook and the rest of
Office.

Slack of course is not at all open.

I use the combo of Fastmail and EM Client (Desktop), many people think these
are pricy, but the quality of the service and product are quantitatively
different from Gmail because I am the customer, not somebody else.

If the Euro zone really wants to do something in the IT space they should push
Apple Messenger, Facebook Messenger and Slack and the five chat applications
that Google runs and Skype to interoperate.

------
upofadown
>Most of the Basecamp team's recent rebelliousness, and seemingly the initial
reason for building Hey, has to do with spy pixels.

How can you tell the difference between a "spy pixel" and an image? Whatever
criteria you use can be worked around.

Email clients should not allow emails to initiate outgoing network
connections... period ... and most of the good ones don't by default.

~~~
drchopchop
So do we go back to a world of completely plain-text emails? No buttons? Links
buried in a wall of ASCII?

We use SendGrid to fire important, user-anticipated emails (i.e. "the Zoom
class you paid for is starting at 8:30 AM, here's the private link").

Blocking all images is insane, and would set back email UX to the BBS ages.
Blocking all SendGrid-served images would simply mean people host images on
their own domain (or disguise the DNS), and could write their own open/click
tracking systems, which would negate the point of blocking SG pixels in the
first place.

~~~
Nextgrid
> set back email UX to the BBS ages

I don't understand why that's bad or why e-mail needs an "UX" beyond being
text. E-mail is there to convey _information_ and text is the most efficient
way to do it. If images are _really_ important, you can include them as
attachments and they'll be displayed even with remote content blocked.

------
eiopa
OMG, "The Screener" is something I've always wanted. There's a lot to love
about this.

Something I am nervous about is using a @hey.com email. Similarly to domain,
it's a world-visible and sticky, but unlike domains, it isn't portable, the
only options are: pay Basecamp forever, or lose access. _gulp_

~~~
marcofiset
Per the FAQ: if you paid for at least a year, you can then cancel and have
your @hey.com forward all emails to another address of your choosing, forever.

------
meagher
Hey is a great option for someone wanting to start over with email, but the
key feature is not available just yet: Custom domains.

The best thing you can do is separate your email address from the client — and
own that address.

I trust Basecamp, but always a good idea to own your name online.

------
troughway
$99/yr for email is steep, but I understand that most people don't want to
bother setting this stuff up and have no qualms paying for it, especially at a
price point that is only slightly above G Suite.

~~~
paulpan
Agreed, $99/year may seem reasonable for all the features and principles but
for most users on Gmail and Outlook, it's a steep entry fee. Probably
intentional for initial launch so that mostly power users try it out.

I think a different approach would've made it $49/year and have additional
features as add-ons. That way users can opt in and only pay for things that
they want. Also gives the dev team signals on what features are most desired.

------
ordinaryradical
I admire rethinking tools like this, but I think that in practice most people
are better off not having a preordained organizational system built into how
they interact with their email. For novices I'm sure it's useful but if you
are tech-literate you probably prefer something that gets out of your way and
lets you systematize according to your own mental model.

If you're a gmail user and you haven't found something like this yet, you owe
it to yourself to give this a shot:

[https://www.boxysuite.com](https://www.boxysuite.com)

~~~
topologix
I've been using [https://www.kiwiforgmail.com/](https://www.kiwiforgmail.com/)
and really like it.

------
warpspin
I liked what I saw but would hugely favor an on-premises service or even
better, a client which could properly do this stuff over IMAP and maybe syncs
the things like notes over WebDAV.

------
kiliancs
Looks great, but the $99/year price doesn't exactly scream "email rebellion".

------
arichard123
If it's down to the user to determine what they do with their incoming mail,
then they will just want what they are used to surely? Doesn't that mean that
every user is going to have to optimise their workflow? Probably those who do
that kind of thing already have a couple of dozen message filters set up. Is
this a SaaS solution to a problem best served by user training and company
policy?

------
hs86
I like to have the same UI for all of my email accounts and the idea of yet
another email address that is tied to a very unique workflow seems undesirable
to me.

This could have been interesting if I could use it with arbitrary IMAP/SMTP
accounts, but I have no idea how well their additional features could be
mapped back to ordinary IMAP folders.

------
nojito
Prescreeners are a terrible idea.

I’ve been bitten by prescreening email resulting in missing tons of email
because they were being funneled elsewhere.

Most of the features are borderline useless and will result in an inadequate
email experience.

Good luck to Hey, I’m sure they can funnel their Basecamp users to adopt it
though.

------
faitswulff
Hey.com actually has too many features for my personal taste. Not that I think
the Unix philosophy is applicable everywhere, but this goes in the opposite
direction entirely. The cumulative learning curve for all these features seems
steep.

~~~
smacktoward
We've had forty years for people to build features like this on top of IMAP,
and nobody has done so. This would seem to be a decent indication that the
Unix philosophy is not going to produce much innovation in this market.

~~~
bmn__
Kolab did.

------
deltron3030
Looks very useful, I just hope that they make the interface more neutral and
less toy-like (pill shapes, extreme round corners and saturated colors), or
have a way to customize the variables that are responsible for this.

------
aSplash0fDerp
Possibly OT, but dropping email and going exclusively with dialtone/messaging
for communications would be a breath of fresh air vs cat-n-mousing around the
global spam issue (being under 24/7 attack/abuse is absurd).

It may take reengineering some models/processes, but good business only
requires good communications (simplicity is the ultimate sophistication).

One-size-fits-all (email in this case) is rarely a solution in the 1st world,
but you don't have to tell a nerd that... They disproved [that] theory long
ago :)

~~~
maltalex
“Messaging” isn’t inherently free of abuse. What make e-mail so abusable is
its distribution.

Closed gardens will always be safer from abuse than open protocols. So what
you’re really arguing for is that we drop email in favor of something more
closed.

~~~
aSplash0fDerp
Removing 99% of the spam/threats/exploitation/whoring shouldn't be so easy.

Again, one-size-fits-all is always black and white (ala open garden/closed
garden), but communications is the fundamental concern being addressed, not
feelings/bias.

------
foobar_
The time to ditch gmail finally. This is the ddg of email.

~~~
jorangreef
Absolutely, except the ddg of email would be written by one person.

------
oefrha
[https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1234640048328282113](https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1234640048328282113)

This is not an email client, but an end-to-end service _with clients_
controlling everything. That’s an immediate no for me. I have multiple email
domains hosted by different providers (including myself), they can’t be
merged, and I’m not gonna let a single company (Big Tech or not) cannibalize
everything anyway. I’m also not gonna use different clients for different
domains on each platform (unless work mandates something, in which case I’ll
single out work).

Oh, and they don’t support custom domains at the moment.

Some features seem nice though.

------
jdhornby
I think the most exciting thing about HEY is the promise of a new way to build
web applications.

[https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1266056835749965829](https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1266056835749965829)

~~~
mleonard
Does anyone know anything more about this (more than what is in the tweet
thread that is, which is not much!)

~~~
mhoad
Some very broad outlines here
[https://twitter.com/sstephenson/status/1272608076433166336](https://twitter.com/sstephenson/status/1272608076433166336)

------
smt88
I was really excited about this, but it seems to be no more revolutionary than
Inbox by Gmail.

------
thomasedwards
I switched to [https://mailinabox.email](https://mailinabox.email) a while
back and really loving it. You rely on using a mail client rather than a
webapp, but I’ve enjoyed having the control.

~~~
addicted
I thought MIAB provided a web client as well?

~~~
petercooper
It does, that's the only way I've used it. It's no Gmail but it's tolerable.

------
LockAndLol
> It costs $99 a year, and its business proposition is simple: You can pay
> Google with your privacy or Basecamp with your money

Um... Tutanota and Protonmail are both privacy-conscious and cheaper than
that.

------
alexedw
Features look quite promising, but I'm not able to find any details on their
site about using your own domain? Probably the only reason I wouldn't ditch my
personal Gsuite.

~~~
timdorr
Nope: [https://hey.com/faqs/#can-i-use-my-own-custom-domain-with-
he...](https://hey.com/faqs/#can-i-use-my-own-custom-domain-with-hey)

------
Hurtak
I wonder how much did they pay for the domain. Anyone has a guess?

~~~
SwiftyBug
A lot. Although they do not say how much.

[https://m.signalvnoise.com/how-we-acquired-hey-
com/](https://m.signalvnoise.com/how-we-acquired-hey-com/)

------
rb808
Looks like a good product. Its an interesting test of how much people value
privacy, I'd imagine 99.9% of people would rather be tracked and have ads than
pay for email.

------
shuntress
I consider it a significant failing that we (in the US) don't have a public
email system like the USPS.

It is such a fundamental and important form of communication.

------
mhoad
While I am excited at the possibility of ditching Gmail, one of the main
things I am most excited about is that DHH has been hinting at a lot of new
tech to come out of this including what he mentioned as the simplicity of
Rails for the front end world.

I've tried taking a look through the sourcemaps for app.hey.com to get a feel
for how that might be working and saw some interesting stuff in there around
HTTP/2 frames and their Turbolinks approach but am going to have to wait until
someone more competent is able to spell it out for me.

------
lean_industries
Used Basecamp in school - it seemed pretty cool/well-designed but it wasn't
really useful for me

------
dna_polymerase
I don't like their claims regarding removing tracking pixels. They still show
the images, and the sender still knows I'm opening them, the only thing
missing is my IP. Unless it is spam, the newsletter I signed up to usually has
way more info than they'd get out of a single HTTP GET.

------
niftylettuce
To launch something with typos everywhere is pretty bad...

~~~
fmisle
[http://itsnotatypo.com](http://itsnotatypo.com) (yes, they registered that
domain)

------
ecmascript
The idea they're pushing about email is that it is a chore, filled with spam
and todo-lists etc. But as a fastmail user, I don't really see how they're
solving these issues.

HEY has less features for a higher price. Fastmail is fast, works great across
devices, works with IMAP and I already have all my domains setup with it.

I thought they would've implemented some kind of new feature solve the
problems they outline but without having tried the product it seems like it is
just another more expensive email provider?

This is all fine though, I just got confused by the PR speak. I really look up
to DHH otherwise and am really into the idea of remote working etc. I am just
probably not one of the people they're marketing towards since I already pay
for email.

------
wazoox
So it doesn't download tracking pixels. But my email client doesn't, either.
Furthermore I read only plain-text email 99.9% of the time. What's the use
case exactly?

~~~
kyawzazaw
For people who doesn’t have the time/skills/energy to do what you described
but still want to avoid being tracked, somewhat care about privacy and using
email with less distractions.

~~~
wazoox
Energy of not using a webmail? IIRC Thunderbird as well as most other email
clients don't download remote images by default.

~~~
lucasfdacunha
Dude, don't assume that everybody is like you. Reading emails on text mode and
blocking pixels with some kind of email client is something that only a few
people that use email do.

You're probably tech-savvy (and also the people that you interact with
probably are), that eliminates almost the majority of people that use email.
The average web/internet user is dumb, really dumb. The easier for them to do
something, the better.

------
noncoml
I am fully behind something like this, and more than happy to pay for an email
service that will stop all the "new-age spam".

But! "Want an invite? To get a code, email iwant@hey.com and tell us how you
feel"

Seriously? A Gmail trick? By playing this trick, you just destroyed all your
credibility.

~~~
fmisle
They will go invite-free next month

~~~
noncoml
It's not a matter of time, but about their mentality. Playing old Google
tricks make them lose all good faith.

------
botolo
The email provider approach is confusing. Superhuman costs way less and works
with Gmail. No need to change email provider.

~~~
corobo
$30/mo vs $99/year, are you seeing something I'm not?

