Below you’ll find a list of the things we hold dear. And the premises we reject. HEY is built on these foundational ideals. While the email industry has been struck with a blank stare for years, HEY has a clear point of view. Here’s what we believe, here’s what matters to us.
To make significant, meaningful upgrades to email, you need to build your own platform. That’s why HEY isn’t an app that sits on top of Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, Yahoo, etc. HEY is a full email service provider. You don’t use HEY to check your Gmail account, you use HEY to check your HEY account. It’s its own platform, and it’s all you’ll need.
It's crazy that anyone who gets ahold of your email address can grab your attention whenever
they choose. The minute they send their email, it's at the top of your inbox, in your face, buzzing your pocket or your wrist. No more. With HEY, no one lands in your Inbox until you’ve explicitly granted them permission. And if you don’t, you’ll never hear from them again. Simple.
Some apps promise to help you speed through your email. But that’s like treating the symptoms, not the cause. The only way to get ahead with email is to get
less email. HEY solves that. First, at the source (you decide who can email you). And second, on the surface (by separating the stuff you really need to see from everything else). It's a profound shift, and it’s profoundly effective. You’ll never go back to the pre-HEY-days.
Marking things unread so you don’t forget to reply later. Starring or flagging something to mean one of a dozen different things. Writing drafts to yourself because you have no where else to keep notes. The days of doing one thing to mean another are over. Hacky, roundabout workflows be gone. HEY gives you proper workflows for the way people email today.
People’s first instinct is to bring their entire email history with them wherever they switch to a new email service. But that’s a major liability, and 99% of it is dead weight. HEY doesn’t import email from other services because we believe a fresh start is a blessing, not a curse. A moment to cut ties with the past and start again. A new house with new furniture, not one packed with all your old crappy stuff from college.
Email’s forever benefited the sender over the receiver. If someone emails you first, they get to name the thread (and it’s usually non-descriptive like "Yo" or "Update" or "Idea"). If someone sends you four separate threads about the same thing, you’re stuck with a mess. Nonsense. HEY lets you rename threads so they make sense. Or merge multiple threads into one. HEY gives you the power to cleanup the mess, even if you didn't start it.
You shouldn’t have to write programmatic if/then statements, regex expressions, or jump through settings screens and configuration hoops to get your email to do what you want it to do. HEY takes a more humanistic approach with built-in workflows, simple options, natural organization, and pre-defined locations that put the right mail in the right place.
Email’s better with a human at the helm. That’s you. You’re better at deciding where things go, what your intentions are, and how you want things set up. The machines have a lot of learning to do before they'll be able to second-guess whether you actually wanted to see that email, whether it was a receipt or a newsletter, and even what you should be writing someone. At HEY, it's human intelligence over artificial intelligence. HI > AI.
Read/unread is such a fundamental part of email that you’d have to be crazy to touch it. We touched it. In HEY, only certain types of emails are read or unread. The rest
just exist. You don’t need to mark a newsletter, marketing email, or a shipment confirmation as read. In fact, most emails shouldn’t come with
an obligation to read them, deal with them, or track their state. They’re just information, they aren’t conversations.
Rather than encourage people to keep cleaning up their inbox, or attempting to achieve inbox zero, HEY takes advantage of time. You can’t get to inbox zero in HEY. You can’t even archive emails in HEY. When you read an email, it just moves down, and, eventually, moves off when newer emails come and take its place. In HEY, emails just flow, they don't pile up. Let go.
Learn more about how email flows in HEY >
Email’s a hassle because you’re constantly digging for things. Digging to find that thread, or the file attachment, or that account number in the middle of that long conversation. HEY brings things to the surface. See files without having to find emails first. "Clip" important parts of emails for instant access anytime. Even add sticky notes to the Inbox so stuff that should stay top of mind, is top of mind.
You don’t need to be told when to check your email. That’s why all push notifications are off by default in HEY. Check your email when you want, not when we tell you to. But sometimes you absolutely want to know when certain people email you. With HEY you can selectively flip notifications on for certain people, or even entire threads. This way when you do get a push from HEY, you’ll know it’s one that really matters to you.
Did you know simply opening an email can share all sorts of your personal data with the original sender? Without you knowing? When an email spy tracker is hidden in an email, they can tell the sender how often you open their email, your general physical location, even the brand of phone you have. We think that’s a violation of your privacy, so HEY blocks nearly all attempts to track your email behavior. Read
more about email spy tracking.
You know those emails where the signature is longer than the content itself? Emails loaded with an endcap of legalese, or a stack of social network images? That’s gotta change. So we’re committing to being the change we want to see.
Name Tags give you a place to show your name, title, number, pronouns, degrees, etc. within a Tweet-like amount of space.
Our lives are full of numbers telling us we’re behind. You have 14 unread emails, 32 new instant messages, and you missed 17 tweets. That’s enough. That’s why there are no unread counts in HEY. No numbers telling you how many emails are in your inbox. If there are 8 unread emails, we just show you the emails - we don’t punctuate them with a number. Email isn’t a game, you don’t need to keep score.
There are lots of “free” email services out there, but free email costs you one of the most valuable things you have - your privacy and your personal information. We’re not interested in your personal data. It’s always yours, never ours. We simply charge a flat, all‑inclusive $99/year fee for HEY. That makes our business work without having to sell your data, advertise to you, or otherwise engage in unscrupulous marketing tactics. We make a great product, you pay a reasonable price for it — that’s fair for everyone.