My review of Hey email client after 14 days
Hey is an email client from 37 Signals, the company behind Basecamp.
Update February, 2024
With the last renewal, I am now looking for alternatives. The value proposition for me is still screening. With the recent calendar release, I took some time aside to review Hey’s feature set. The calendar feature was unusable as it didn’t support Google sign-in based syncing, which stopped me from connecting my work calendar. I looked at other competitors and found the Spark app to be right up my alley in terms of features. It has screening, great UI. I am now running Spark and Hey together with the hope of slowly transitioning to Spark next year.
Update April, 2023
Hey’s search is not optimal; for searching for emails, I tend to go to Gmail. If your workflow involves recalling previous conversations, make sure to evaluate Hey’s search capabilities before making a purchase.
My background with paid email clients
I am no stranger to paying for email clients, my long-running paid email client is Newton from cloud magic. Reasons why I switched to Newton,
- Newton supports portability for multiple email accounts (All my email accounts were Gmail). Email account connections are stored in the cloud and hidden behind Newton’s login.
- Low memory usage. I used Newton before M1 and all other email clients used to have more than 200MB of ram.
- Minimal UI
Letting go of Newton and how my email usage evolved
One of the first reasons I gave up on Newton was that it became a bit buggy, which tainted my experience with it. My work communication slowly moved to Slack, so there were no more critical emails coming that needed my urgent attention. With Google’s quick account switching, managing multiple email accounts also became less painful on desktop.
Additionally, Gmail’s mobile app evolved to support multiple accounts and implemented features such as snooze.
One of Newton’s original features was read receipts in email. I didn’t have a solid use case for this feature. With all these reasons, I decided to let go of Newton after a couple of years.
Trying out Hey
For the past couple of months, I started subscribing to some newsletters that I actually cared about. With years of email activity, my primary email has become unmanageable. I hardly monitor the inbox now, with all the junk mail coming in. I am a heavy digital content consumer and enjoy reading. Because of this, I decided to give Hey a try. Hey’s feature set solves this by implementing a screening process where emails go through a manual review, which requires you to categorize them as important, feed, or paper trail.
Who’s Hey for
In my opinion, Hey excels at managing a specific subset of email use cases, primarily reading. If you handle a lot of emails that require reading and replying, then an option like Superhuman might make sense.
To summarise, I view Hey as the email equivalent of what Feedly/InoReader is for RSS, catering to those who prioritise organisation and efficiency in their email interaction.
Will I purchase Hey?
For me, the decision now is about whether I should pay $99/year to get a clean inbox. After 14 days, I am still not finished screening the emails I receive, and to properly review the Feed feature, I don’t have multiple emails from the same sender. Having said that, I am planning to subscribe to Hey for one year and see how it goes.
