July 2020

I’ve been using HEY for two weeks, and I love how much less of a hassle email is now. The teams at Basecamp and HEY did a fantastic job. It’s well worth paying for re-imagined email.

Here are a few of my favorite features in HEY.

The Screener: New senders don’t get through to you unless you let them.

Unread emails stay at the top, by design: No more mixing read and unread emails. Yes, you can set up your inbox like this in some email clients. By HEY does it by default, not as a workaround.

The Feed: I LOVE the Feed. Such a smart way to read newsletters and marketing emails. It feels a lot like an RSS reader. I can browse it whenever, and it’s not a big deal if I miss something.

Set Aside and Reply Later for emails you want to get back to: In Gmail, I would star emails that I wanted to get back to later. But stars alone didn’t distinguish an email I needed to respond to vs. an email I was keeping for reference. HEY’s workflow accounts for both of these instances.

Focus mode for emails in Reply Later: I love seeing the email and my response side by side! No more scrolling up and down email chains. It would be great to have Focus mode for individual emails, too. 🙂

Keyboard shortcuts directly on the menus: I can actually learn them this way! I like using keyboard shortcuts, but I usually forget about them because they’re tucked away on a help page.

Notifications for when you get emails from specific senders: I don’t need notifications for every new email, but it’s nice to turn on notifications for certain people when needed.

Notifications are off by default: HEY didn’t even ask me if I wanted to turn on push notifications, and that’s awesome. There aren’t badges or red numbers for unread emails. Nothing in the app or in my browser demands I check in.