I’ve been trying alternatives to Google services lately. No offense to Google. I just used their services uncritically for years. Now I want to evaluate them against their competitors. For example, I now use DuckDuckGo instead of Google.

Basecamp released HEY recently. It is a privacy-focused email client that aims to give power back to the user. This sounded like something that I might appreciate. Every Gmail account I’ve owned uses a similar combination of features. Priority inbox, some specific settings that must be checked, a bunch of filters, etc. It’s always the result of iteration and resignation. It never feels quite right. It’s easy for me to believe that an email client could provide me a “wow” experience by encoding my workflow into the UI, and providing an “I’ve never known it before, but I’ve always wanted that!” moment.

I got a launch invite and decided to try it for a week.

Let’s cut to the chase: HEY is a good email client, but it’s not a good fit for my relationship with email. I’m not going to pay for it. But this post isn’t a hit piece. Negativity is cheap and lazy. I’m going to explain the value that HEY provides. I will also explain why it wasn’t a good fit for me.

How I evaluated HEY

I forwarded my personal Gmail into my hey.com account for one week. I got ~120 emails from ~80 senders. I only sent a handful of emails. This matches my personal email load for a typical week.

I kept a running Google Doc with notes. I especially wanted to split my negative notes into a few piles: bugs, dislikes, and mismatches.

I want to focus on mismatches in this post. When did HEY make me feel uncertain or afraid? When was I fighting it?

I’m not going to mention bugs. Do you really want to hear about a problem with using keyboard shortcuts to scroll through email? They probably fixed it before I published this post.

I’m not going to tell you about nitpicky choices that I didn’t like. This post would become a monument to my own change aversion. “The information density is too low! I can only see 9 emails on my laptop!” Jake. Chill. You’ll get used to it.

Anyways, I used HEY on a variety of platforms. I used the iOS client on my iPhone X. On desktop, I accessed it through Firefox on my 15″ Macbook Pro and my Windows gaming machine.

Privacy-first

I like HEY’s privacy stance. HEY explicitly blocks pixel trackers and loads images through a proxy. It will also “name and shame” companies that send emails with trackers by putting a special binoculars icon over the email.

Some digital marketers don’t like this. Mailing list health is an important metric. If they can’t track open rates, then they can’t know how people are “progressing through the funnel” of reading their emails.

Fine by me. It’s hard to imagine receiving any benefit from telling a remote server, “psst, I opened your email.” I like that people can opt-out of ads with ad blockers. I also like that HEY focuses on opting-out of tracking pixels.

I didn’t care about the “name and shame” part of their pixel tracking. I’d be happy if they just had a counter saying “We stopped 531 tracking pixels this month.” I’m not interested in learning who sent an email with trackers. I just like that the filtering works.

The Screener

HEY requires you to “screen in” every email recipient. When someone sends you an email for the first time, HEY shows a button asking you to “screen them in.” You will receive all future emails from them if you say “yes.” You will never get their email if you say “no.”

Do you receive a lot of unsolicited email? Promotional email you never read? Recruiter spam? Then you should seriously consider using HEY. Imagine saying “no thank you” to a spammy recruiter and never thinking about their emails again. Imagine the promotional emails never grabbing your attention. Imagine opening your email every day and only seeing the emails you want to see. That seems to be HEY’s vision, and I like it.

I interacted with the Screener a lot. I received email from ~80 different senders this week. I screened five of them out.

I don’t receive much unsolicited email. I aggressively unsubscribe from promotional mailers. I turn off email notifications that I don’t want. I sometimes delete services if I get too much email as a result of being a member. As a sidebar, deleting my LinkedIn account was a huge email quality-of-life improvement. The constant parade of recruiters dropped to manageable levels. You should consider it.

I spent lots of time considering some of the Screener decisions. I used to have a Netlify project that I have since deleted. I don’t need to receive email from them now. Maybe I should say “no” to a promotional email that they sent me. But what if I want to use Netlify in the future? I liked Netlify. I might use it again. Would my “no” still apply? I would be missing email that I need to receive. What if I lose my job in the recession and Netlify contacted me about a job opportunity? Would it be screened out? I had this kind of debate repeatedly throughout the week. Who is a sender? Is it a single email address? Is it a company? Is it an individual who could be represented by multiple email addresses? What about catch-all addresses like noreply? When can I safely reject email? I only felt safe using the Screener in a few narrow cases. In cases like Netlify, I screened them in and unsubscribed from the mailing list.

I’d like to make two caveats to this section. First: it seems that Gmail does not forward spam to HEY. I don’t know how good HEY’s spam filtering is and I don’t know how important the Screener would be in relation to it. Second: I only used HEY for a week. The Screener was a constant presence in the beginning. It appeared less as the week went on. I imagine that it wouldn’t appear much next week.

The Imbox, the Feed, and Paper Trail

When you screen an email into HEY, you can choose one of three categorizations.

The primary location is the Imbox. This is the IMportant BOX. It’s an intentional spelling, and is designed as an inversion of an email inbox. The logic goes like this: Other people get to decide when stuff appears in your inbox. You need to intervene to stop it. On the other hand, something only appears in your IMbox when you declare it IMportant enough. This means that you have reclaimed power over the email that you receive.

This is also why HEY provides The Feed and Paper Trail. These represent common email types that you may not need to see right away. This is designed to further improve the Imbox experience by moving these emails out of sight until you want to see them.

The Feed is “The place for newsletters, marketing emails, or anything you want to casually browse.” I put a word-of-the-day email, some Google Alerts, and some newsletters into The Feed. Instead of acting like an email inbox, it is designed to be a content reader. You can periodically skim this content. But it’s not front-and-center in your Imbox.

Paper Trail is “The place for receipts, confirmations, and other transactional emails you receive.” I put automated notifications into here: online order confirmations, credit card purchase notifications, Twitch’s “this streamer is now online” notifications, etc.

After using the categorization for a week, it was clear that I struggled with both of them. I receive a daily newsletter with lengthy emails (Money Stuff by Matt Levine). It’s too big to read all at once during my workday. In practice, I sneak 5 minutes here, 10 minutes there. When it’s in The Feed, this means that it was not an email. Instead it’s a card that is slowly being pushed down by other things in The Feed. The later in the day I started reading it, the harder it becomes to complete it 5 minutes at a time. Maybe I’d move this specific newsletter out of The Feed. There’s not much left at this point. I’d have to keep polling to find when the two or three remaining things ended up in The Feed. Everything might as well be in the Imbox.

I also regretted putting many of my emails into Paper Trail. When I buy something, I want to see the purchase receipt Right Now. I also receive credit card alerts for every purchase I make. This helps me identify recurring purchases that I no longer need. When these are in my inbox, I can read and clear the notification immediately. When things are in Paper Trail, they don’t seem to have “Unread” markers. You need to scrutinize timestamps and dates to figure out what might be new. If my Amazon order ships, I want to say “Cool” and then delete the notification. I definitely want to see it.

I fought against this workflow all week. HEY does a good job of explaining its categorization system. But I struggled to live in it. I really just wanted everything to appear in the Imbox. This is the same reason that I stopped using the “Multiple Inbox” feature in Gmail: I’d rather stop unwanted emails at their source, instead of moving it into a separate low-frequency box.

To be clear, this is a good system that is a mismatch with my relationship with my emails. I don’t “casually browse” my newsletters, and I want to read all of my transaction receipts while my brain is still thinking about the purchase I just made.

Other advanced features

There are other advanced features that I didn’t use, or used lightly.

Search worked well. I looked for a few things. I found what I was looking for.

HEY has a pair of features called “Reply Later” and “Reply Focus Mode.” This allows you to put off sending replies to emails. Later, you can enter a focused mode that allows you to reply to these specific emails without any UI distractions. I forwarded myself a few emails to put into here when I was experimenting with HEY, but I didn’t end up using the mode with any real seriousness. I don’t receive a ton of email in my personal account, so I don’t run into this problem much.

You can “Set aside” an email if you need to reference it. I can imagine needing this at work. If someone sent me a lengthy meeting summary that I will convert into calendar invites and bug tickets, I can imagine using this feature. I can’t imagine ever using it in my personal account.

If I could change one thing about Hey

You might expect that I’d want to change something about its workflow. After all, the workflow didn’t work for me. But it’s someone else’s workflow. They enjoy it. I’m not going to mess with someone else’s workflow.

I would invert how the tutorial works. I experienced the tutorial as a three stage process:

• A guided tutorial of UI elements.
• A series of emails explaining the UI features.
• A Screener help card that lasted until I categorized 15 emails.

I experienced this as a breadth-first iteration across the UI. It started broad, and then explained all of the deep features. “This is Hey! We have a Screener! And an IMbox! And Paper Trail! And a Feed! And Reply Later! Here’s the Hey menu that shows all of them!” 

This was stressful in practice. It felt like I was expected to memorize all of the definitions before I proceeded. But then I went back to my Imbox and I didn’t see anything that had been introduced. I realized that it’s all hidden behind a menu. HEY did tell me about this menu. But it told me quite a lot in a 5 minute span, so I didn’t remember.

I came back the next day. I didn’t see any of the other inbox types. Where did all of it go? Oh right! It’s all hidden behind a menu. On the plus side, HEY sends you some of the tutorials as emails. This gave me an easy-to-find reference. They definitely helped. I kept revisiting them over the first few days.

It didn’t need to feel this stressful. HEY’s home screen is an intuitive email inbox. I could read and write emails immediately. I could use the default email functionality without a tutorial. It felt like they wanted me to immediately be a power user, without ever being just a user. Starting out as a power user is a lot of work for my first half hour of using a new product.

I wish that Hey’s tutorial was more spread out and depth-first. I spent most of my week screening emails. I did that more than anything else. So I wish that it focused heavily on the Screener in the beginning, and then introduced the Feed and Paper Trail when I moved emails into it. Later, it could describe the more advanced features as emails enter your Imbox. I understand the pressure to differentiate yourself and prove that you’re worth $100 early in the user’s journey. But the education process didn’t feel good to experience.

The Verdict

HEY is a fast and easy-to-use email client. I think it’s going to have a lot of users and will be fairly successful. It gives me hope that there will be an email client that I would pay for someday.

There are a few situations where I would recommend HEY:

• Someone reads the HEY features and says “oh hell yes” because this is how they view email.
• Someone receives lots of unsolicited email that they don’t want to read.
• Someone is really into multiple inboxes and wants to try a Gmail alternative.
• Someone needs a structured workflow to manage an out-of-control email inbox. They lose emails under the pile of stuff they received.

After years of heavily curating my email inbox, I believe that I’ve prevented myself from benefiting from these workflows. I found myself pushing back against the multiple inboxes feature. I can’t imagine myself using the “Reply later” feature. All I’m left with is the Screener and the Imbox.

I’m only going to permanently switch away from Gmail once. I won’t be switching to the 2020 version of HEY. I hope that they continue to evolve the email client in a thoughtful way. I can imagine myself switching to a future iteration of HEY based on its privacy stance and its speed.