📨 Quick Hey Email Thoughts

23 June 2020 📨

Only just got a Hey email, but I figured I’d add to the collective thoughts. I don’t really have to much to say, but I’m strongly considering sticking with it for a few reasons.

Two initial things that are important are:

1. Custom domains are coming.
2. If you pay for a year, you keep the @hey email forever and they will forward your email to you even if you stop paying for as long as Hey exists.

Starting with custom domains would’ve been really nice because now I feel like I’m in a little bit of a limbo going all in. Implementation details are fuzzy and I don’t want to start using this e-mail for too many things when I don’t know what the switchover will be like.

I really want to go all in on Hey, mostly because it’s the first decent e-mail client I’ve actually liked on iOS since Mailbox and my Gmail is so flooded with crap that I just want a fresh start and this feels like the perfect opportunity. One big downside is that once I get used to their paradigm, I know I’m going to want it for work e-mail too. While I can set-up forwarding, I can’t reply from Hey to them. It’d be awesome if there was a way to reply from my work email if the message was forwarded from it, but I don’t think that’s possible.

Having a bit of a hard time understanding their philosophy around read e-mail that I’m done with. They make the Trash an extra touch, but having all the read e-mails in the Previously Seen section seems a bit odd. On top of that, I feel like I heard they don’t hold on to e-mails unless you specifically tell them to. So after x amount of time, they get deleted. I don’t know if that only refers to the Trash or if they dump Previously Seen e-mails too. I also don’t remember where I heard this and couldn’t find it on their website with a quick gander.

Notes, Subject Editing, Reply Later, and all the other features they’ve put together are great. I love The Feed and The Paper Trail, everything seems thoroughly vetted in terms of how someone actually wants to use e-mail.

I’m going to continue to tinker over the next 14 days, but I strongly think I’ll hand over the $99, even as someone currently furloughed. Similar to Roam, Hey seems worth the cost on top of the subscription fatigue I’ve been going through.