Thoughts After Using HEY for Six Months and Why I Abandoned It

I don’t ask for much from email—as long as it works, I’m happy. A while ago, I saw HEY launch with its emphasis on privacy, a pay-to-use model, custom domains, no bloated JS, and so on. At a price of just $10 a month, I used it for over six months.

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

Initially, I was drawn to HEY’s features, like bundling newsletters into a single view; emails from first-time senders not landing directly in the inbox; setting up email aliases for more granular sorting (like routing contact@example.com to a contacts folder and feed@example.com to a dedicated newsletter folder); and unique features like adding notes or reply-in-thread.

These features seem nice, but they weren’t deal-breakers for me. After all, you can set up filters in Gmail, which feels much more powerful functionally. Switching to HEY was mostly about setting up a custom domain.

However, after about two months, I began to realize that aside from custom domain support, HEY’s other features and workflow really didn’t fit my needs. Here are a few examples:

1. Inability to Log In via Third-Party Clients

HEY’s core philosophy is to replace existing email clients. To access your HEY account, you have to log in through HEY itself, and on mobile, you have to use the HEY app. This means you cannot use Apple Mail, Spark, or Outlook to check your HEY email.

2. A Subpar User Experience

With DHH’s strong aversion to JavaScript, what you get instead is a subpar user experience. Every time you open an email or switch folders, it triggers a full-page refresh¹, forcing you to wait a few seconds.

Sometimes I want to re-read an email I’ve already opened, but because of HEY’s core philosophy of “letting email flow,” read emails get pushed all the way to the bottom. When you have a lot of unread mail, you have to scroll down endlessly. On top of that, HEY’s filtering isn’t as intuitive as Gmail’s, and the speed is noticeably slower. The cumulative frustration from these small friction points far outweighed the novelty of HEY’s features.

The Solution

Later, I discovered that if you use Cloudflare for DNS, you can configure Email Routing directly in Cloudflare. For instance, you can set up me@example.com and forward it to another email address (provided you own that destination address as well). This achieves the custom domain benefit while letting you continue using your existing Gmail or iCloud.

Beyond that, you can also pipe incoming emails into Cloudflare Workers for more advanced processing, such as triggering webhooks or integrating with GitHub Issues.