FWIW, this page about custom domains still says it will come to personal accounts:
I’m not sure when this page was last updated though.
I’m not sure when this page was last updated though.
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Thank you! I am almost tempted but no send later is a bummer. However, the reply later pile is intriguing and could probably emulate the same idea.
I would really need to give it a serious try.
Federico Viticci talked at length¹ about his experience using Hey on yesterday’s Connected
¹ The total conversation about Hey is split into two chapters in the episode, the first being 27m47s and the second being 22m36s, for a total of just over 50 minutes.
I can’t remember the last time they talked about any app or service that long. But if you’re interested in Hey there’s plenty of content for you.
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Great Post! Any thoughts you can share about Protonmail? Thank you
Hey’s value proposition seems pretty low to me.
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Thank you for posting your thoughts.
In my humble view (and I have written in detail about this), Hey’s biggest feature is also its biggest problem.
Hey is not flexible and if the way HEY works is in line with how you work with email, than its a match made in heaven (assuming you don’t change your ways). Basecamp made Hey the way they want to use email.
This inflexibility and close platform doesnt work for me. You can use any open system and set it up like Hey (to almost 80%) and be on your way. Like you have done with Apple mail and any imap service of choice.
The other big problem is that I still have to go back to my previous service for my emails. I refer back to my emails all the time. For Hey to assume, I wont ever need them is crazy. They still have yet to give a single reason why there is no option to users to import their mail into the 100gb storage they provide. Something that almost every paid service does. Hell, even the free ones will import all your mail.
The other main issue is the value proposition of $99 a year. With Fastmail at $50, I cant see getting twice as much value out of Hey as I get from Fastmail. Not logical thinking but I have limited resources like everyone else on this planet and I do not mind paying more if I get value out of it. Right now, I do not see the value.
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To be fair, emulating Hey completely would require a Sanebox subscription on the side, for automatic filtering. You can achieve the same result with filters of course, but it’s constant work, unless you’re very conservative with your subscriptions.
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Good point. it depends on your use case. I do everything on fastmail with their rules and filters. That is sufficient for me. I took inspiration from Hey and set up Set Aside and The Feed folders (drag and drop and rules). Using a flexible system allows me to take inspiration from others. Hey wouldn’t allow me to take inspiration from someone else. Its their way or the highway (my dad used to say this a lot, and now I am saying this… i am getting older lol)
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One thing in particular to note is that Federico evidently has early access to Hey for Business (which he is using with the MacStories domain) so anyone specifically interested in those aspects might want to give Connected a listen.
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Applying the habits you picked up with Hey to your own system is super smart. Thanks for sharing this.
I have always wanted a way to defer acting on an email within the native Mail.app, so I created a “Reply Later” folder and modified this AppleScript to move a message into it and set a reminder with a single hotkey. Perfectly nerdy way to spend a early morning on Thanksgiving Weekend 
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Nice writeup!
Context: the primary use of personal email, for me, is conversational threads with friends and family. I don’t run business out of it and I don’t subscribe to a ton of newsletters.
Hey’s working out quite well for me. It’s just my personal email at this point, so I don’t think about it as often as I used to. I actually don’t think about email in general as much as I used to, because Hey reduced a bunch of problems for me, in a way that requires zero maintenance, and it also replaced my old solutions that had been running for ~15 years in Gmail without my having to deal with cruft anymore. More time to figure out to-do organization. 
I also really like the aesthetic though understand that’s subjective.
It seems like one difference between me and everyone else in the thread is that I actually like having the new email address, i.e. I’m not just handing out my old email address and processing in Hey.
My biggest issue was handling huge threads that go on for days or weeks, which I’ve written about elsewhere on MPU. I love these email threads because some of my best friends keep up with each other this way. It took a few months, but they finally implemented a solution that makes it easy to stay caught up with them without loading the whole thread. That eliminated my biggest concern about sticking with Hey.
My second biggest issue is search. You’re right about all its limitations although, for me, the way it surfaces files mitigates that as it’s saved me time a few times. The most annoying search term I’ve found is “D&D” - it can’t find my D&D threads! Support has acknowledged it needs improvement but not given a timeline.
The third biggest problem is the performance of the Mac app–hopefully electron support for Apple Silicon trickles down into production apps quickly. In the meantime, I just use the browser. The iOS app is much better and the bulk of my usage.
So, again, nice writeup, totally agree, and at the same time, I would hate to give up the saved time, peace of mind, and fun I’m having since the email address switch.
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Has anyone switched to Hey from Spark? Items that I’ve read here - auto sorting mail into “buckets, snoozing, thread handling is handled pretty well with Spark. What is it that would make me switch?
I’m curious.
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I have tried Hey and possibly every email app under the sun, and I have landed on Spark. It’s not perfect, but I find it’s the “least worst” of them all.
Spark does snoozing flawlessly as well as send later and custom domains (which Hey does not). It has a smart inbox which does decent filtering but I find it very badly implemented (read emails sink with all read emails with not further sorting, which defeats the whole purpose). Threads work as with any other app, but they work well. I find Spark is really well complemented by Sanebox, at least until they improve their smart inbox thingie.
Yes, I continue to use Spark. You hit my one gripe – emails sort beautifully into “smart folders” while unread (though you do have to train them on every platform, the filter doesn’t sync), you can’t set it to keep the sorting once the email is read. It works fine if you deal with them immediately. i.e. delete, reply, move to another folder, but if you do nothing other than read, then Spark sets them to the “seen” smart folder. I’d prefer them to stay in the Personal, Notifications, and Newsletters smart folders. I’ve got into habit of “flagging” any emails I want to deal with later, this way they are sorted into the “flagged” smart folder.
I’ve requested them to make the change several times, and allow read emails remain in their respective smart folder. btw, for non-spark users, you can switch to a regular inbox on the fly.
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John Voorhees and Federico have lots more discussion about Hey on AppStories:
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MailMate forever! But I also tried Hey and quickly abandoned it. Email is just too central to a lawyer’s workflow to be put in the box that DHH came up with. It’s not a bad service by any means…in fact, I would probably keep using it for my personal email, but it just wasn’t worth $99/year to me.
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I agree with you. I don’t see anything in Hey that makes it worth $100/year.
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There was a recent Hey update that might interest some:
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I can’t imagine using an email service for work without built in calendaring and contact management. Thought about using for personal domain, but I do like Fastmail has CalDav and CardDav support. Love trying new things, but going to wait for now!
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Interesting, but, after lots of experimenting, I much, much prefer centralising all my email tasks in my task manager so that I know exactly to do with what email when, how urgent it is, and how long it will take me. It implies a little bit of maintenance, but I find having it all in the same system is very calming for the mind. I know what I have to do without opening my email app… and running the risk of getting derailed.
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