Reflections on Using HEY After Six Months and Why I Decided to Move On

My demands for email are modest—I'm satisfied as long as it works. Recently, I stumbled upon HEY, which prides itself on privacy, user-paid services, custom domains, and a lack of unnecessary JavaScript, among other features, all for just $10 a month. After using it for over six months, here are my thoughts.

HEY — A delightfully fresh take on email + calendar, from 37signals

Initially, I was captivated by HEY's mechanisms, such as consolidating newsletters into a single page for easy consumption; first-time senders not landing in the inbox by default; the ability to set up email aliases for finer categorization, like directing contact@example.com to a contacts folder and feed@example.com to a newsletters folder; and unique features like adding notes and replying in threads.

While these features seemed appealing, they weren't essentials for me, especially considering Gmail's powerful filtering capabilities outshine HEY's. My main reason for switching to HEY was for the custom domain feature.

However, about two months in, I realized that aside from the custom domain capability, HEY's other features and operations didn't meet my needs. Here are a few points of contention:

1. Inability to Use Other Clients to Log In

HEY's core philosophy aims to replace existing email clients, meaning you must log in through HEY's platform or its app to access your HEY email account. This restricts access through other email clients like Apple Mail, Spark, or Outlook, confining you solely to HEY's ecosystem.

2. Mediocre User Experience

With DHH's strong aversion to JavaScript, what you get instead is a mediocre user experience. Actions such as clicking on an email or switching folders result in a full page refresh¹, which can take several seconds.

Revisiting emails after reading them becomes cumbersome because of HEY's "let email flow" philosophy, pushing read emails to the bottom of the list. This is particularly frustrating when you have a lot of unread emails. Moreover, HEY's filtering capabilities are not as intuitive as Gmail's, and the speed leaves much to be desired. These minor inconveniences accumulate, overshadowing the novelty of HEY's features.

Solutions

I discovered a workaround using Cloudflare for DNS management, which allows for custom routing of emails. For example, you can set up an address like me@example.com and have it forwarded to another mailbox, provided that the other mailbox is also yours. This achieves the effect of a custom domain while allowing you to continue using Gmail or iCloud.

Additionally, Cloudflare Workers can be used for more advanced email processing, such as triggering webhooks or integrating with Github Issues, adding a layer of flexibility and functionality beyond standard email services.

Footnotes

1. Technically, this is achieved through Turbo, which reduces page load time by fetching the HTML of the next page asynchronously via fetch or ajax and then replacing the current page. However, this experience can still be significantly delayed when dealing with pages with substantial HTML content. ↩