If you follow technology news on Twitter, you have probably heard about Hey.com. If you haven't, it is a new subscription product based on a different way of looking at email. Hey has a great heritage, as it is made by the team that developed Basecamp. Hey is not just a new email client; you can't use an existing email address with the product. Instead, for good or bad, you have to embrace the Hey way of processing and reviewing email. While I disliked it at first, the Hey email way has grown on me. And it's not bad. In fact, it is terrific.
There are two main reasons to try HEY email.
Reason 1: A New Approach to Email
The first reason to try Hey email is if your current email inbox is a mess. Suppose you are bombarded with spam and junk email and can't keep up with the volume of email you receive. If you've had your email for a decade or more, this is likely you. Emails from everyone you have ever purchased from, were once interested in, or ever corresponded with. Plus, emails from all of the companies that have purchased mailing lists are using your email address. Stringent use of unsubscribing processes and developing complex filtering rules can be time-consuming and often not worth the trouble.
Hey positions itself as a new approach to email. It is built around a highly selective approach to allowing email into your life. You have to screen and allow each email sender into your email. You have all the control, and that is a good thing. Hey also has built-in filtering of allowed emails to prevent anything unimportant from showing up in your "Imbox" - _IM_portant email BOX. A little cheesy name, but it gets the point across.
I was intrigued by Hey's proposition of more selective email, but I didn't expect many gains. I felt I already had an excellent grasp of email processes. I was surprised!
I am a firm believer in the /Inbox Zero/philosophy of Merlin Mann and GTD the heck out of my email. I've spent a lot of time putting in rules and unsubscribing to unwanted email lists. I felt I did an outstanding job of managing my email. At the end of each day, my inbox was clear, and everything that needed to be done was filed into the appropriate folders and Onmifocus tasks. I was skeptical about how much Hey's new way of looking at email would help my email process and whether it could become more efficient. However, looking at so many regular emails through a new lens made me realize just how much time I was still taking to curate my email feed.
Reason 2: Online Privacy:
The second reason to get Hey is if you want a more private email viewing platform. Many people, including myself, are getting increasingly uncomfortable by the amount of data being tracked of your online activities. At first, this data was useful for seeing relevant ads. Still, data collection has rapidly grown to creepy levels, as the recent GDPR legislation in Europe tried to control.
Let's face it, Google is perhaps the best known and implemented email provider. However, as the saying goes, "if you aren't paying for a product, you are the product." I've become increasingly uncomfortable with the amount of online data that advertising-funded products are accumulating. Several years ago, I switched my web surfing to Duck Duck Go - a privacy-focused search engine. That switch involved a painful learning curve, and I am pleased to say the searches have improved in quality over time. I don't miss Google-search-tracking at all.
The main attraction for Hey.com was the promise of ad-tracking free email. Marketers will get less personal information about what I open and what I like. What I read and what I don't. Where I shop, and how often. This had me excited to try Hey to feel more comfortable about the data that I am sharing with technology companies and the people they sell their data to.
My Experience With Hey.com
I signed up for the Beta with Hey.com quite late in the game. Mostly because Hey wanted an email to explain why you hated your current email. Because of my strict rules about email, such as not having an email client on my phone, this proved inconvenient and took me some time. That means, when they did launch, the cool (and affordable) names were already taken. So much for Justin@. But that's ok. I hadn't really expected it. And I don't want to pay for their extremely costly vanity addresses (3 digits are $399USD per year, and 2 digits are $999USD per year). But with a 14-day trial, I thought it was worth kicking the tires. I signed up and forwarded my primary personal google email address into my new Hey account. The process was straightforward. Hey prompts you to download their native applications to your computer and devices or use it on the web. You cannot use your existing email program with Hey, which has advantages and disadvantages. It means you are stuck with the un-customizable Hey interface.
The Hey.com Experience
It took me a while to get used to Hey email. I immediately liked parts of it and hated other parts. Things that I could easily do before and made sense in my workflow were now impossible. There is no archive functionality. And I can't use folders to organize my mail. I also can't clear off old messages out of my Imbox, creating all kinds of internal anxiety. But there were sparks of genius that deeply resonated with me. And so I decided to stick the entire 14 day trial before deciding if I was going to lay down a substantial amount of money on email for the first time.
I had a strong reaction against the Hey email application. It is very simple. The design is what it is - without options to tweak settings, widgets shown on your screen, or anything. It looks like a very simple webpage packaged in an Electron wrapper for your desktop or mobile device. Though to be fair, the system usage is much better optimized than many Electron Apps (I am looking at your Grammarly). After using and being accustom to busier interfaces, this is a little minimalist and uncomfortable—no lists of email. No folders. Just a logo (which serves as the host for the drop-down menu options) and a big blank screen.
The Imbox
The Imbox is the place where you get to see the vital mail explicitly chosen by you. And it works by having you screen any first-time senders. You choose whether you want to see the email and where you would like it to be delivered. It's really straightforward, except for the initial feeling of a lack of choices for filtering.
Emails are displayed inline in the inbox. The latest one shows first, and you can read the entire message and simply scroll down to the next message. A pop-up window, accessed by clicking on the circle logo to the top left of the email, allows additional actions. These include moving the email to one of the three main collections folders, trashing it, marking it for reply later, or setting it aside for later review and action. You can also add tags to make searching easier.
The simplicity of the Imbox is still one of my challenges with Hey. After you read an Important email, it sits, read, at the bottom of the screen. As someone who became used to an empty inbox as a signal that all messages were adequately sorted and processed into the appropriate place to deal with them in the proper time (from GTD), this change is very uncomfortable at first.
Luckily, Hey has some ways to flag email for future needs, and these live on the bottom of the Imbox page.
Reply Later
If you mark and imbox email with Reply Later, it is shown in a stack at the bottom left of the imbox window. It is surprisingly effective, though I miss a way to prioritize by day, rather than just adding to a stack.
Clicking on an of the emails in the stack opens up a screen with all of the Reply Later emails listed, allowing you to work on them quickly and without a lot of extra clicking. Perfect for batching email.
Set Aside
Marking an email with the Set Aside tag puts it into a stack on the imbox screen's bottom right. It's useful to put things that will need a review at some point or further action, and you don't want to lose in the Imbox viewed messages.
Like the Reply Later, this opens a focused Set Aside window allowing you to focus on what you need to review.
The Feed - a collection of marketing emails that you may want to see
The Feed is the second main page of Hey. It's accessible through shortcuts in desktop applications or by clicking the Hey icon and selecting it from the pop-up menu. The Feed is the place that most of your routine email is best stored - all of the non-urgent emails that you want to see at some point, but that you don't want to stop and deal with then and there. This is mostly marketing emails and newsletters that are not particularly urgent. Still, you don't want to send them to the screened out list.
The Feed was initially my most disliked screen in Hey. It felt like a bad RSS feed of my email. I still have some issues with the implementation, but I am getting used to it now.
The Feed displays the top 2" of each email, and you can click to expand. If you expand, you then have to scroll past the entire message to get to the next email. I find you spend a lot of time scrolling up and down in Hey, as the program seeks to turn your email into a long webpage. You can make the same choices to each email message if you want, including deleting, moving to the imbox, setting aside, or marking for reply later. You can mostly scroll down until you come to the last message you have seen (if you remember, as there is no read email identifier on this screen).
I've gotten used to it and find that, in practice, this was not so different than I was doing with my email before. It is just more automatic.
The Paper Trail
The final collection in Hey is the Paper Trail. This is where you can automatically route your receipts and emails that you want to keep for future reference.
I find this really handy, but do have to remember to check on it once in a while to ensure that all transactions are legitimate and that there are no warning errors. The filtering is only based on the email address and is not contextual.
Additional Functionality
Other functions within Hey are available, including Clips, Tags, Drafts, and a comprehensive Search. Clips are the most unique, as a place to store interesting parts of emails as, yup, Clips.
I have been pleased to see that there have been regular and constant improvements to the platform since the beta. Check out @Hey's Twitter feed for more the best place to see what updates and improvements have been integrated weekly.
Downsides
Hey does have a few downsides. The biggest one for me is no available signature block for outgoing emails. It's a bit of a showstopper, and I worked around using some TextExpander automation, but it isn't ideal.
Also, there is currently no support for custom domain emails. This means any of the emails sent to my personal domain get an answer from an @hey.com email address. They have promised this feature for an extra charge in the future, and I am looking forward to that integration.
Personally, I'd like an archive function to make closed loops out of finished and completed emails. Still, I think this is contrary to the design philosophy of the Hey team.
And another significant downside is the cost. At USD 100 per year, Hey breaks the model of free email. It's twice the cost of a custom-domain g-suite account, while still missing some of those functions.
I don't think Hey is a useful business tool yet. Maybe with some modifications in the future, but I feel it is better suited to a personal/personal brand email solution.
Conclusion
Hey is an excellent email service but requires a user to rethink your traditional way of doing email and embrace the Hey philosophy. It is inflexible in design, but that also adds to the easy and functionality of use. Once you get used to it, email is quicker to screen, read, and prioritize.
Hey's privacy-awareness should be a consideration for anyone who lives on the internet.
Be warned, the journey is rough as it changes years of built-in mental muscle memory. You must unlearn your previous habits as well as create new ones. I went through many stages of emotion when trying the 2-week free trial. But once you get through it, and realize how freeing your email now is, you will likely continue as a paying subscriber. I am. And don't miss my old email folder structure at all.