I pay for my email. I'm no longer sure how I feel about who I pay.

This one isn't really a software review. It's me working something out.

I left Gmail for a boring, specifically European reason. The plugins I relied on to sort newsletters, ads and junk out of my inbox stopped being offered in Germany over GDPR considerations, and suddenly the thing that made Gmail bearable wasn't there anymore. HEY solved that on day one. The Screener means nothing reaches me until I've said yes to the sender once. The Imbox (no typo!) keeps the important mail separate from the stuff I scroll when I have a minute. It blocks tracking pixels by default. I tag things. It works.

It isn't perfect, and I'll write about that separately — it seems to get developed in bursts, at least it feels like that. Collections, "workflow" and tags all sort of overlap without ever quite connecting. The calendar is something I seriously cannot get my brain around. But those are product complaints. I can live with product complaints.

What I'm finding harder to live with is that I no longer feel comfortable with one of the people I'm paying.

The part I'd rather not write

David Heinemeier Hansson co-owns 37signals, which makes HEY. He also writes, publicly and under his own name, about immigration and the future of Europe — that ending mass migration should be the continent's first priority, that multiculturalism has failed, that London has changed in ways he mourns. I'm not going to characterise those pieces for you. He published them himself and he writes clearly; if you want to know what he thinks, read him:

• Failed integration and the fall of multiculturalism
• As I remember London
• Three sacred cows that must die so Europe can live

He's entitled to hold those views and to publish them. That isn't the question I'm stuck on. The question I'm stuck on is what, if anything, that means for me as a customer.

And with HEY the answer is uncomfortably concrete, because HEY isn't a subscription I can quietly cancel. It's my address. It's what I am registered with, what people saved me with in their contact lists and at the bottom of six years of correspondence. I committed to an @hey.com identity, and I now wish I had stayed on my own personal domain, where leaving would be a weekend's work instead of a small act of self-demolition.

So I've been looking. And I haven't found anything with the same mix — the screening, the newsletter handling, the pixel blocking, the tagging, all in one place that doesn't feel like homework. Nobody else has built this. That's the honest status: I want to leave and I don't have anywhere to go.

The sidenote that makes this hard

Here's where it stops being simple, and it's the reason I'm writing this at all.

On 31 August 2026, 1Password became a Distinguished Corporate Patron of the Omacom Foundation, committing $100,000 a year for three years. The foundation funds Omarchy, a Linux distribution DHH controls. 37signals committed the same amount. It's announced openly.

1Password is on my favourites page. It's in my top tier. It holds my SSH keys and asks for my fingerprint every time something wants to use them, and I've called it one of the best decisions I've made about my own security.

Now — sponsoring an open-source project is not an endorsement of the founder's politics. Companies sponsor developer tools because developers use them. That is a completely ordinary marketing decision and I have no evidence, at all, that anyone at 1Password was thinking about anything else. I want to be scrupulous about that, because the distance between "funded a Linux distro" and "agrees with everything the maintainer believes" is enormous, and collapsing it would be unfair.

But I notice that once I start asking the question, it doesn't stop. If I'm uneasy paying 37signals, am I uneasy paying a company that pays 37signals' founder's foundation? What about the companies that pay them? Every tool I own is three degrees from someone whose opinions I'd find objectionable if I went looking. Do I audit my entire home screen? Do I audit my pension?

I genuinely don't know where the line is.

No conclusion

I'm not going to pretend I've resolved this, because I haven't. I still pay for HEY. I still use 1Password daily and still think it's excellent software. I'm still looking for an email provider that does what HEY does, and still not finding one.

What's changed is only that I've stopped pretending the question isn't there. That feels like less than I'd like to report. But it's where I actually am, and I'd rather write that than a tidy ending I don't believe.

If you've worked out where your line is, I'd genuinely like to hear it.

Written alongside the Mac software I actually use. Put together with AI, based on my own use and my own opinions, final version with many personal edits that the AI may or not approve of ;)