Am I the only one that feels like this article (along with this resulting HN thread) is straight out of the Hey PR machine? I guess I just don't understand the value this type of post adds to the HN community.
I signed up for a hey.com trial, to test it with emailprivacytester.com (of which I'm the author). I was a bit disappointed to be honest. When you use hey.com's webmail, it loads remote images when you read an email, and there doesn't even appear to be an option to turn that off. Granted, they hide your IP by proxying the content, just like Gmail does, but they don't hide the fact that you read an email, or when you read it.
These systems should really just fetch all remote content in advance, rather than waiting until it's read. That would make it impossible for a sender to know if a message was read or not.
I feel like that has become my typical experience reading The Verge - "here's this thing! You shouldn't use it, you should totally use this thing that we (or our sponsors) like better!"
I remember reading their articles about the Windows Phone and some early Android devices, and realizing that the 'review' was just some guy complaining about how it's not like an iPhone, as if approaching a user interface or solving a problem in a different manner than Apple was inherently a bad thing for all use cases, in all places. That sort of promoted fanboy-ism permeates, well, almost all of their articles, be it a tech piece or a purported report on politics.
These systems should really just fetch all remote content in advance, rather than waiting until it's read. That would make it impossible for a sender to know if a message was read or not.