I had a fella write in answer the questions I would theoretically ask if I were to actually start interviewing people like I should. His answers were 50% about HEY, the email service. A lot of the questions are answerable with a feature from HEY.

Is spam a major issue for you? No. Hey has a great spam filter. Do you use categories, tags, or any other sort of organizational system? I use Hey’s auto-labeling. Do you have any special system for using burner emails? I rely on Hey’s catch-all inbox for burners. And more!

There is obviously something to HEY. Plenty of people have a lot of good things to say about it. To me it seems like an actual crack at approaching email with a fresh perspective. Stuff like being actually forced to “screen” your emails to approve who can send you email and who can’t is a pretty bold take. And the opinionated auto categorization seems a bit more aligned with how humans actually think.

This all feels a bit different than something like Superhuman, which I don’t necessarily dislike, but it’s just like a decent email client. I’ve tried it and it wasn’t worth the fairly hefty price tag, but certainly no shame if it’s your favorite and you feel productive in it.

The thing that kept me off trying HEY in the earlier days of it was that you had to have an @hey.com email address. I just didn’t have any occasion to spin up an entirely new email address. I’ve had the same one since late college (chriscoyier@gmail.com) and it’s worked out well for me. I wouldn’t mind trying HEY, but I’d likely want to do it on top of my existing Gmail. Being able to bounce around email clients without losing data is something I really enjoy (much like RSS readers, Git clients, calendars, etc).

They now have HEY for your own domain, which is nice, but isn’t quite the same thing. It’s smart to do that since then you can move off HEY if you want some day by re-pointing MX records and such. But it’s not quite the same as just using Gmail under the hood.

But hey (heh), I missed that they can totally do Gmail now. That is, Gmail can forward to your HEY account, and HEY can send from your Gmail account. So that’s pretty much there. But they are clear:

Just a quick note on what this is not: HEY is not a Gmail client. It’s not IMAP. But now that you can have Gmail automatically forward emails into HEY, and you can reply using your Gmail address, it’s seamless to your recipients. They can keep emailing you at Gmail, and you can reply with your Gmail address, all the while taking full advantage of all the incredible things HEY can do.

So the problem them is if you go back to a Gmail client, you’ll have a shitpile of emails just sitting in there. When you archive an email in HEY, it doesn’t archive in Gmail like it would with an IMAP connection. Still, it opens the door to me trying it someday. And if I wait long enough maybe they’ll do IMAP too!

Until then I’m still on the Mimestream train.

There is also the company. Those dudes. They say and build some brilliant shit. Then they say and so some stuff that really rubs me the wrong way. They are opinionated as hell, but don’t seem to like it when other people have opinions. Overall, there is an element of cockiness that I never seem to be able to get over.