Hey email app review | Better than Gmail?
About a month ago I made the switch to Hey, a new email app service from the company Basecamp. I'm going to review the good, the bad, and how Hey compares to Gmail, Outlook, O365, and some of the other popular services.
The main view of Hey is called the Imbox and it has all the important emails. Unlike most other email clients Hey doesn’t have too much in terms of folders or organization. You can label messages, similar to Gmail but most messages end up in one of three places. The imbox for important stuff, the feed for things you may want to know about but isn’t really important, and the paper trail for receipts.
For context, I’ve been using email for over 25 years and I’ve seen and tried every-flavor of email client. From Pine, Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo, MS Outlook, Outlook Express, Firefox Thunderbird, Gmail, Apple Mail and O365.
In using Hey, there are a lot of things that set it apart but the biggest change is how it has re-thought the most basic interactions of email. Hey has rethought the basics of reading and replying to messages and focused on these to be batch operations. This makes it easy to clear an entire inbox and get to Inbox Zero every day without a lot of effort.
These batching concepts of email extend to other areas too. Hey has rethought how people will receive and read newsletters, how people get screened/in or out of the inbox and also how you will or won't get notified by new messages.
The fresh approach makes Hey easier to use and much less twichy for general interactions. The features of Hey aren't complete when you compare it to gmail. There are things that you may enjoy that aren't yet part of Hey but for general email interactions I'm finding that it's quite capable.
Hey is a $99/year service and when deciding on it you should really consider the value of your time. There are many services that are free so really approach Hey as an alternative approach. While it lacks some features I find that it makes up for this with the basics that it does well. I expect that over the coming years the service will continue to improve and provide a more full-featured toolset.
What do you think? Have you given Hey a try?