HEY Email Reviews

I was one of the first users of Gmail, getting in on the first round of beta invites that went out. I was so enthusiastic about a company bringing the concept of email out of the Stone Age. But as the decades passed, Google dropped the ball. They dropped the “do no evil” mentality in favor of the bottom line. We all learned, the hard way, that advertising-based companies like Google and Facebook don’t care about their users, they care about advertisers. Because there’s no such thing as a free ride, and on free platforms, your attention and data are what is being sold, to marketers.

Finally, Hey is here to reinvent email again, and this time for the better. Yes, Hey is a subscription service. And that’s a good thing. That means they don’t have to sell their souls, and your information, to survive. They have an actual, ethical business model. On top of that they protect you by filtering out those nasty tracking “pixels” in emails that let marketers know a scary amount of detail about you, including how many times you opened their emails, at what times, roughly where (geographically) and on what types of devices.

And there’s so much more to love about Hey. The Screener, the Imbox, the Paper Trail, Reply Later, Focus & Reply, global files browsing- I can go on and on. I’m thrilled to be a Hey customers, and I think you will be too.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not cheap, but it completely changes the way you interact with and use email.

For the vast majority of people, HEY is far better than any other email. It asks you to sort and use your email in a specific but simple way.

Perfect is the enemy of the good. Most people don’t even sort their bills/orders/newsletters out of their main mailboxes. Sure, HEY won’t give you 100 different sorting mechanisms and 50 ways to create rules, but the one or two ways it has, work exceptionally well.

The best work is always created when there are strong limitations in place. The best products limit how you do things, but the options are simple and well implemented. The best systems change your habits for the better instead of fitting into your existing ones.

HEY is all of these— simple, well-implemented email that will change how you use email for the better.

Other notes:

Take 30 minutes to watch the tutorials; it’s worth it. As long as your use case falls into the limits of the system, then it’s the best.

Sure, you can spend weeks trying to hack Gmail into doing a similar thing to HEY, but unless you’re a tech nerd who’s already done that, HEY is much less work and is far better designed for most use cases.

I had kind of given up on trying to manage my Gmail account. Every time I tried to clean it up, it would only be a month or two before it was flooded again with unwanted messages, and random receipt and shipping emails obscuring the stuff I actually cared about. “Hey” really does put you in control of your email inbox, and successfully separates the different categories of emails that there are (standard, newsletters, transactional ones) so that you can address each of them appropriately.

The ability to screen out all first time senders empowers you to decide what makes it into your inbox, and the general policy of zero ads and zero data collection is a breathe of fresh air.

If you have $99 a year to spare on an email service, it’s definitely a worthwhile investment.

No custom domains (are business users to promote your domain instead of theirs on all email sent and received - I know it is announced for future but at least you could have changed the email address in to/from/reply-to headers), no folders (how’s a giant inbox going to work after many 1000s of emails if you need to search for an email of a year ago ), completely captive service (how will you get your data out when you leave the service since it’s only on their server?), no read receipts (spying? Nothing more than bringing email on par with chat apps).
Anyone who claims these features are ‘revolutionary’ are uninformed. Take a look at Polymail, Newton, Spark etc who’ve had similar functionality for years AND are compatible with existing email services.
But 5 stars for great marketing : create artificial scarcity with a waitlist, and free viral marketing from a public rift with Apple.

So idk what's going on with HEYEmail or if it's just a scam or what. I saw that it has widgets in the screenshots though - and I know that's only available in iOS 14+, which I haven't upgraded to yet. I'm gonna go ahead and guess that's why HEYEmail isn't working for me at all. But I mean as a user that's not really my fault - the Devs should've made HEYEmail incompatible for anyone not using iOS 14 or below if they knew it wouldn't work. Very misleading to let users with older iOS versions download HEYEmail when it doesn't work for them.
If that's not the reason why HEYEmail isn't working for me, well then I just don't know what the issue is. Other than the fact that after signing up I'm presented with a blank black screen that doesn't go away. Not even after restarting HEYEmail . So yeah, either HEYEmail won't work on iOS 13 and below - or it's just poorly designed and fatally flawed from the get-go. Either way it's useless to me at the moment so I'm uninstalling it.

I have been a Gmail user since the early days of the product. But after over 15 years I have become disenchanted with the service. Ads have taken over, my data is being sold and frankly my Gmail address is everywhere after 15 years and a spam filter just can’t do enough.

I have tired every solution under the sun: specialized clients, add-ons, filters/rules, labels and no matter what i used something felt amiss.

Along comes HEY, and from the first pitch I saw on the service I was intrigued. Basecamp and team definitely have a set of strong I ideals and opinions on what should and should not be in the world of email, and i strongly happen to agree.

Privacy... CHECK, Data Security... CHECK, Quickly sort emails into practical categories...CHECK, In-depth Search.... CHECK, Great Unique Aesthetic....CHECK

I am a full convert, and only after a day of use during the trial I happily signed up, forwarded my gmail to HEY and let everyone I knew I have made the switch.

Not to mention how responsive the team is to both bugs and ideas for how to improve the service.

Thank you Basecamp and HEY team... I finally found an email that gives me what I have been looking for.

Bells and whistles are being implemented before essential functions and fixes. This is supposed to be email for work, so that's not great. Search is infuriating and has caused worse meeting-start issues than the mess that made me move to Hey. Things need to be there when you search, always. Give us a checkbox for global search at least. Then, there's the jumpy search UI, seriously, enter should "do" the search and let you just be on a real search results page, instead of jumping to any one result; or in other words, *autocomplete is not interface!* There's more besides this but I don't want to go on and on. The search issues are truly a dealbreaker. I'll change my rating when it's worth renewing again... But right now it's got a negative dollar value worse than the $99 fee. It's cost me real money and time. And I can migrate off but again... money and time.

At this point in my life, I’d rather pay roughly $8.25/mo for an extremely well-designed email service than by giving up any hope of privacy by using any of the mainstream services for free — wherein the product is really myself and my data.

The UX is very well thought-through, to the point that opening and checking your email almost feels like it always should’ve in a world without spam.

The only downside to the approach that Hey takes is that you do have to spend more time up front manually screening senders. But you can always re-allow screened senders, which means you don’t have to fret too much about screening too aggressively.

There are some really good ideas in this service that may very well change the future of email: privacy first, blocking spy trackers, different workflows for different kinds of emails, screening senders before allowing them in your inbox. All great stuff.

A challenge is that the service is premium priced while offering a subpar iOS app that contains a bunch of web views that only work if your internet connection is working well. Thinking of opening an email, and drafting a response, on a plane without WiFi? Think again. Expecting basic UI to show up when you tap a button? It will, and quickly, if your internet is working. If it’s not you might not have even a reply button available.

This would be a 3 star or better app if it wasn’t premium priced, but premium pricing without a premium app following the HIG and platform best practices is a 2 for me.

I can’t believe HEYEmail didn’t exist earlier. HEY has made it so easy for me to control who I get email from and who I don’t. It’s also ridiculously easy to navigate - the UX is simply delightful. Love the wittiness of “Imbox” and love how easy it is to thread together emails, change subject lines on my end, and so on.

A few fixes in the future that would be useful include making it easier to go from a Contact to the main contacts page without clicking the main nav every time. Also, I’m so used to an archive button and love seeing a “zero” imbox. But these are minor details.

The respect of my privacy is something that I’ll gladly pay money for. Well done!

let alone worth the $99/year. I paid for it but am canceling. They did a good job of allowing you to organize incoming email but that’s about it. FAR too muck clicking and scrolling. No scalable view, like a list - it’s truncated emails - a total PITA because if you open one (and it’s at all lengthy) you have to scroll back up to get rid of it. No way to quickly pick several emails and trash them all at once. iOS version is the worst. The Mac version is better but only by a bit. Though I welcomed the sorting from the get-go, it takes me the same amount of time to deal with email as it used to because so many steps are needed and too much time required to click back and forth to the 3 locations one receives mail, to trash what you’ve read or might want to trash without reading, etc. And if your Net connection is sat all funky expect it to hang. Not recommended.

I downloaded HEYEmail but...it is useless. You need to be already registered to use it but what the heck, you can’t even do this using HEYEmail ? Is this kind of a joke?
All five star reviews sound suspiciously similar, the five star reviews are long and very descriptive, something SOME users may do but not 99% of them. 😜
Sorry but I was really curious about HEYEmail but the reviews set off all my alarm bells and the fact that there seems to be a very public fight about the subscription model of HEYEmail (99 USD per year for what exactly, for something 90% of the people don’t need or want anyway? 🙄), actually leaves me to believe that this is a huge marketing ploy to advertise HEYEmail, kind of a David vs Goliath fight, trying to make HEYEmail known to a wider crowd of people and finding an excuse for it’s subscription model. Who wouldn’t pay 99 USD per year just to make a point vs Apple? 😜😉
Not getting MY money, guys. Sorry!

Email has never been so enjoyable until Hey came along. HEYEmail is really designed well and show a lot of promise as they continue to make updates. The productivity workflow is really refreshing as it gives you a new take on how you’re supposed to use email. Definitely makes it a lot easier to reply to the emails you didn’t get to and reference back to information when needed. It almost makes me want to use email more for daily use. I can’t wait to see what next big update they come up with and what features they might think up. Job well done in my opinion.

I was so thrilled to finally receive my invite to join Hey - my Gmail Inbox was a perpetual source of stress and the alternatives were barely better. Finally an email service that recognizes that just because someone has your email address doesn’t mean they should be able to reach you!! Also, no more guessing at key words to track down a reservation or order number you forgot to star, subscriptions that it’s impossible to get out of the trash, or googling around for third-parties to allow large attachments. Hey, I’ve been waiting so long!!

Hey as a product is awesome but they claim the “set aside” section is saved offline. However, I can’t actually get it to work. Saving tickets and other things offline by putting them in “set aside” doesn’t result in tickets being visible offline. I sent a support request in and they said that the ability to view images in emails (like barcodes in tickets) offline is a feature they’re considering but doesn’t yet exist. So…what’s saved offline? The text of the message? I guess? But that’s not super useful.

It’s been over a year and saving a ticket or a receipt offline just doesn’t work.

Sure, it isn’t perfect. I wish the automation were a couple of steps more powerful, but as someone who prefers email to bother me as little as possible, it beats regular email by a mile. I rarely feel that familiar stress of opening up my inbox or that old dread of needing to sort through a list of unread messages. Hey keeps things tidy and under control.

I have picked up the habit of scrolling through my Feed every morning, as it only contains things that interest me, and am even subscribing to more newsletters. I never would have done that with the old-style inbox.

They have some very opinionated design and workflow for email, and I love it! Takes a little getting used to the different organization but it’s like what Gmail was over a decade ago: fresh, lean, and awesome. Keep up the good work Basecamp peeps!

Also, strong work getting vocal with HEYEmail Store rejection and causing positive change for a bunch of smaller devs that didn’t have a voice, platform, or dollars to risk standing up to the big guy! Who would have thought Apple would end up looking like late 90’s/ early 2000’s Microsoft. Anyway, happy you all arrived at a truce.

All the other solutions try to wrangle email to their own ends, typically using Gmail or Outlook and some secret sauce marketing. HEY makes you sit and think: does this even belong in my email? You can’t category your email blues away here. You have to nip them in the bud. Let emails in and sort through three boxes: an important folder for things requiring a reply or your attention, a folder for receipts, and a feed for marketing emails and newsletters. Best part? You’ll never get to inbox zero—there is no unread badge. Not for everyone but it’s for me.

I used to loathe email, and then Inbox by Google came along. I was an early adopter, asking for the invite as soon as I found out about it (ca. 2014!). I got my wife, friends, and co-workers on it.

And then Google did what Google does and killed it, forcing me back into the cluttered mess that is Gmail.

Basecamp has vowed to support their products until the end of the internet.

They also have a secure, and privacy minded approach to email.

The screener and feed are my two favorite core features: no longer can some stranger grab my attention and distract me endlessly.

The read together, focus and reply, and lack of an archive are all habit changing features that will require some time to retrain myself and yet I look forward to finding a simpler and better workflow.

I cannot speak highly enough about HEYEmail, the people who built it, and the things they stand for.

The team at HEY! has made me excited about email again. I used to be scared to even look at my inbox. I had lost all control. With HEY! I’m back in the drivers seat. This product is incredibly well thought out and the team is outstanding. What I love is they listen to their customers. If you don’t like some thing you can tell them and they’ll get back to you. Sometimes they’ll implement it and sometimes they won’t but they’ll definitely make sure to acknowledge you and the request unlike many companies.

This mail app is for the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes...the ones who see things differently— they’re not fond of rules... You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things... they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.

On first blush, there is so much here to love, it’s a ground up reimagining of what email should look like, and it really works. My inbox feels like it’s working for me finally. There are minor things I miss from their opinionated approach (email signatures a big one, I understand the reasoning for ditching them but it stings a bit). Whether or not I stick with Hey for the long haul, I hope that the majority of the ideas represented here make their way into other email services. This changes the way email should work, and for the better

No one *likes* email... typically. HEY legitimately changes that. The level of clarity and thought that’s portrayed via the product is incredible. So many “duh that’s brilliant” features like merging threads, private notes, screener approval, and renaming SLs are just a few. It’s clear that the basecamp values have been ported into HEY in the best way. Excited to transition all of my personal email here going forward and will be replacing Gmail starting today. Brilliant work. Oh, and Apple, I love you guys but please play nice w/ these guys. No one likes bugs or fights.

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.

The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them, disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them.

About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward.

Maybe they have to be crazy.

How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?

While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

I go through email apps like water trying to find the best one for my needs.

Turns out, the problem isn’t just with HEYEmail , it’s with the whole concept of email as the service that it is.

HEY has changed that paradigm completely, offering a simply incredible rethinking of email that is far more than what you’re used to and infinitely more powerful. Well done, Basecamp, as usual. You never disappoint.

Just got my invite and set up my account. I’m very impressed with the thought put into this and the system and features offered for keeping email useable.

It’s still an early release and there are things missing which I hope will come in the future (e.g offline mode, the ability to turn on notifications for VIPs only). Overall I’m excited and optimistic by the possibilities HEYEmail has!

HEY is world-class software design. They’ve taken something we all thought was “done” and re-imagined it by putting the user at the center of it all. From not distracting you with every notification and dopamine hit (so you can work), to simple workflows that let you GSD, HEY just works. Ecstatic that I get to reclaim email. I plan on writing more email now that I feel my inbox is mine again.

Gmail? Who’s she? I don’t know her.

Hey is the future of email. Just started my trial, and will be upgrading. Hoping some of the bugs are addressed in the subsequent release (if Apple’s ridiculous abusive review process allows it). Happy to pay for a service and a company that truly cares about user privacy, and ethical consumer/business practices.

I’ve been using Hey for less than 24 hours, but it has already changed my relationship with email. I used to hate dealing with email. Now I love it. Everything feels organized, yet I don’t feel like I’m spending time organizing. After 10+ years, Hey replaced Gmail in my iPhone dock. 😍

I’ve spent the last ten years trying out and installing different email apps just to find myself always going back to the stock mail app and gmail. Hey has addressed every pain point I’ve had with email and even fixed a few I didn’t know I had. Worth every cent.

I’ve been hoping for an email service/client to sweep me off my feet for AGES. Hey does that.

If email is a crucial part of any personal/professional workflows, you owe it to yourself to give this a chance — if you think $99/year is too much then you don’t properly value what HEYEmail can do for your time/concentration/mental energy.

Definitely the most original approach to rethinking email that I’ve experienced, and I’ve tried nearly every email “app”.

This is less of an email client and more of a complete reimagining of how email can work for you, and I am here for it.

Apple is holding bug fixes hostage over them enabling Apple payments so they can take a cut. It does indeed feel unscrupulous.

This product is amazing and so is the whole team involved in the project. I’m excited about email again.

I don’t yet have my invite, but I can already tell the team at Basecamp has done it again, and provided an email client with massive productivity improvements that will save the human race collective years of reading useless email. I hope Apple changes their IAP policies for all of us.

I am really enjoying HEYEmail so far and looking forward to completely move way from my gmail.
This is the service that should be setting the standard on how to treat users’s data from now on!