The client is slow and buggy. For instance a key features is to not notify you of emails for senders you mark as low importance. However, this doesn’t work, the client still notifies. It’s also very difficult to find an email once you’ve read it because it disappears from the immediate view. The client is painfully slow, especially for larger email chains. I never feel like I know what messages where, so lots of keyword searching; a simple option to stop emails disappearing into the blue would help with this - people often refer back to recent emails. Also the option to mark multiple emails as read in a reliable fashion would help - but again poor implementation prevents this. I like my email address but the client implementation is poor; it’d be much better to write it as a proper app instead of web wrapper.

Onboarding and tutorials made picking this app up very easy. Super smooth setup of my gmail forwarding and sending from those addresses too. For anyone a bit sick and tired of the same old email apps and workflows give this a go.

Hey change the whole way you use and interact with email. It’s so clever in the way you control the email notifications and basically everything about email no more pointless notifications, or pointless emails. Now, is it worth £99 a year? well I think that’s a little steep but when you balance it’s against the work gone into this app and difference it can make to the way you interact with the streams email then yes it is but you have to try it. Use the 14 day trial and see if it changes things for you.

But sluggish performance on iOS / web lets it down

I just wish the app was a lot snappier (no delay opening email). Performance should be a priority

Superb email product concept that in itself is class leading and very well executed but whilst the aesthetic is good, this app’s interface fails to reflect the product’s excellence due to often laggy and non-responsive interaction.

Hey.com offers an excellently designed service. It looks great and seems very reliable. Having a hey.com email address is different and cool. However, it’s a very expensive service for what is essentially an email account with built in filters. The filter design / process may suit you or it may not. Other than email there are no other add-ins like calendars (although the hey.world blog feature is nice it’s not something many would want to use). To add a domain requires a separate subscription - ie you don’t get a hey.com and a yourdomain.com email address - and costs even more. Whilst moving away from ‘free’ email hosts for privacy is recommended for privacy I can’t suggest hey.com and won’t be renewing my subscription. It’s just too expensive for a standalone email account with filters. The same functionality could be manually implemented with a little effort elsewhere (such as fastmail).

Love Hey folder structure but, on iOS, messages that are set aside are not “saved offline.” Impossible to access without a connection; caused a major headache recently when traveling. Update: still an issue with latest release. Simply doesn’t do what it says on the tin. When’s the discount coming?

I love Hey, and I’ve been a paying subscriber for a little over 18 months now. It’s transformed the way I view and interact with email, and for that, I love the Hey email service itself. The app suffers a bit though - not least through latency. I have background push on for this app, but it seems not to pick up new mail until I open it. As a result, I’ll fire up the app, check my imbox (nothing new) flip over to the feed and paper trail to check those, and when I go back to the imbox, new email magically arrives. It’s a noticeable lag that adds a cognitive step to my use of the app - I’m learning not to trust the imbox view until I’ve checked both other ‘tabs’ and gone back to the Imbox, and that’s not what I expect. I like to be able to open the app, check if email is present, and then close it if needed - not feel that I need to spend 30 seconds in the app before it updates my mail. I’m a huge fan of Basecamp (now 37 signals again!), Basecamp the service, and Hey the email service, but this app falls short of the sort of quality and polish that I would expect from the team that clearly puts a huge amount of thought into their applications. I have other irritations about the Feed (please collapse this by default - then I don’t have to scroll and scroll and scroll to quickly review what’s new), but I also respect that some limitations are inherent in a multi decade transport system that can’t be fixed. If I could just have new email available when I open the app, not an indeterminate time afterwards, then I’d be substantially happier!

Some great ideas and execution. Customer support and team are awesome. But wrapping a web app instead of shipping a native app is just not a killer user experience. There’s lag and latency rendering UI elements and screens, weird glitches (tab between fields on iPad Magic Keyboard loops between To: and Subject: and never makes it as far as the body of the email; occasionally I type too fast for webkit and carriage returns double up at the start of an email; the screener gets confused if you have multiple accounts connected and have filtered to just one). This would be *the* killer app for email if it was a native experience. As it is I use it in spite of its significant shortcomings because the aesthetic, quality of thinking, and interaction design are superb — it’s just let down by what I think is a misguided (but understandable) loyalty to HTML.