I left Gmail for a very European reason
Most people who leave Gmail write a manifesto about surveillance. Mine is duller than that, and more specific.
I had Gmail working the way I wanted through a set of plugins that sorted newsletters, advertising and general junk out of my inbox before I saw them. Then those plugins stopped being offered in Germany, on GDPR grounds. The tooling that made Gmail liveable simply evaporated for people in my country, and what was left was an inbox I no longer wanted to open.
HEY fixed that on day one, in 2020, and I've paid for it every year since.
What it actually does differently
The Screener. Mail from anyone new doesn't reach you. It waits, and you say yes or no to the sender — once, permanently. This sounds small and it is the entire product. An inbox where nothing arrives without prior consent is a categorically different object from one where you delete things forever.
The Imbox. Important mail lives apart from the newsletters and receipts, so the stuff I read properly and the stuff I scroll through when I have a spare minute aren't competing for the same attention. I still want the newsletters. I just don't want them interleaved with anything that matters.
Tracking pixels die at the door. Senders don't learn whether or when I opened anything. This should be table stakes and mostly isn't.
Tagging for the things I want to find again.
The part where it's actually annoying
I'd rather say this plainly than pretend I'm delighted with all of it.
It gets developed in bursts, and you can feel it. Features arrive, then nothing for a long while, then several more. The result is a product with genuinely good ideas that don't connect to each other. Collections, "workflow" and tags all overlap conceptually, and after years of use I still couldn't confidently tell you which I should reach for when. That's not a feature gap; it's a coherence gap, and it's harder to fix.
The calendar is something I seriously cannot get my brain around. I've tried. I use Fantastical instead and I've stopped fighting it.
The deliberate wall around it
HEY has no IMAP. That's not an oversight — they departed from the old standards on purpose, and several of the things I like above only work because they did. But it does mean HEY cannot be pulled into another mail client. It is its own island.
For me that's settled a question I never actually decided. HEY is my personal mail; Outlook is work; the wall between them is absolute because the technology makes it so. That's cleaner than the arrangement I'd probably have drifted into. But I should be honest that if HEY offered plain IMAP tomorrow, I'd at least consider wiring it into Outlook — so the separation I'm praising is one I had no say in.
There is a harder question about HEY that has nothing to do with the software, and that I've been sitting with for a while — about the people I'm paying, and whether that's something I get to separate from the product. I've written about it separately, because it deserved more than a paragraph here and because it isn't really a review.
The verdict
$99 a year, no free tier, fourteen-day trial. Six years in, the Screener alone still earns it — I genuinely don't know how I'd go back to an inbox anyone can write into. The product complaints above are real and I'd like them fixed. The other question is harder, and it's the one I'm actually wrestling with.
Part of the Mac software I actually use — nineteen tools, one write-up a week. Put together with AI, based entirely on my own use and opinions.
