Hey.com: a review (and why I won’t be switching)
Before I start, a disclaimer:
I’m comparing the functionality of Hey.com vs my current mail system, Gmail. I realise that Hey.com also has a privacy upside to it, but I’m only focusing on functionality here. All of the statements are my own opinion, and not meant to disregard the efforts of the people at Basecamp in any way.
With that out of the way, let’s dive in!
I received my Hey.com invite on June 17th, and immediately forwarded all my incoming mails from my Gmail account to my new Hey account.
The first thing that you notice is how empty your mailbox is. I can totally understand the decision to not allow the importing of old e-mails because it doesn’t really fit with the functionality, but this leads to a lot of switching between Hey and Gmail when looking for an old e-mail, be it some information you want to re-read or someone’s contact details or address.
I assume the switching to your old mailbox will reduce over time, but it’s still a problem. Both founders suggest users on twitter to export their old mailbox to mbox format and store it somewhere, but that only gives you a backup, it doesn’t solve the search problem. It’s 2020, I want to be able to search my old mails from any device I have, and not have to wait for it either.
The Screener
Let’s focus on the new and innovative feature: “The Screener”. While the idea behind it is definitely cool, I quickly felt it posed some problems which I could not get over for some reason.
First of all, receiving e-mail becomes an active thing instead of a passive thing. Before, I would receive an e-mail, read it, move it to any folder, archive it, block the sender, or any action you’d expect to be able to do with an e-mail. But now, you’re thrown into a new decision making process: Do you want to receive e-mail from this address, and if so, where do you want the e-mail to go? (Imbox, Feed or Paper Trail being the options).
The problem is that this decision isn’t as simple as it seems. Since Hey bases their destination folder on the sending e-mail address (as opposed to on the content like Gmail does), this means that when a business sends you a newsletter coming from info@business.com, your first reaction might be to assign the newsletter (and thus the sending address) to The Feed. However, the same business might be sending you an order confirmation from the same e-mail address, which would then end up in The Feed instead of the Paper Trail! Even worse, you could send them a question through a contact form on their website and they might answer you from the same address again, but this time you’d like to have it in your Imbox instead.
Google is very good at classifying mails into Primary, Social or Promotions, both based on sending address and content (and probably many more parameters). By only looking at the sending address, Hey.com is falling short of the competition here.
The same decision process is a problem when deciding to block an email address from sending in The Screener. I receive a newsletter from a website which I sometimes visit but where I’m definitely not interested in the newsletter. In Gmail, this newsletter would either end up in Promotions, where I could just ignore it, or in my Inbox, where I would be triggered to go unsubscribe from this newsletter.
In Hey.com, you might be tempted to just click No, and be done with it. No more newsletters, great, right? Not quite, turns out you just said no to ALL emails coming from this address. If the same company now wants to send you an e-mail which you wanted to receive (say, “Our database has been breached, please reset your password”), you just said no to that e-mail too.
This leaves you with either saying Yes to too many mails (because you don’t want to risk missing an important mail from the same address), or saying No but having the feeling that you might regret having said No in the future.
Spam
Hey.com has a spam filter which is way stricter than Gmail’s. Sure, we can discuss about what actually is counted as spam, but I personally feel Gmail is doing a pretty good job at it, especially in the case of false positives. I’d rather have one spam mail more in my inbox than missing one important mail in my spam box. Even though I only used Hey.com during the trial, I still had several mails go into spam which I wanted to have received in my Imbox instead.
Mobile app
I also installed the Hey.com mobile app on my phone (Android) as soon as I made an account. The first thing you notice: No notifications! Hey.com explains it themselves here: https://hey.com/features/notifications/ . The app offers you the option of turning on notifications on a thread or sender basis, but that feels like a burden to the user. If a colleague sends me an e-mail after I have left the office, I still want to receive a notification about it on my phone. Asking me to proactively whitelist all my colleagues (and any other person I would want to receive notifications from) seems annoying. My phone has perfect notifications settings (disable per app, do not disturb mode, etc). Hey.com should at least give the option to receive a notification for every e-mail in your Imbox. I’m a grown up, I can decide how I handle my notifications myself, especially if you’re charging 99$/year for your service.
Apart from the notifications, I noticed on several occasions the app was slow in loading content, both when opening an e-mail or switching to The Screener view. I observed this both on 4G and Wifi, and have never had this issue with my normal Gmail app. I assume they can fix this in future versions, but it was annoying for sure.
Conclusion
I won’t be switching to Hey.com as my main email client unfortunately. As excited as I was for a new and improved e-mail experience, I feel like Hey.com isn’t it for me. While they definitely bring some new and cool stuff to the email table (Reply Later, Set Aside), the implementation of some features feels very opinionated, and even if they added the possibility to turn off The Screener and turn on notifications globally (which are my 2 biggest gripes), I still feel like it doesn’t win out vs Gmail (calendar integration, better content and spam filtering, etc).
