My Bad! https://twitter.com/heyhey/status/1278751341016301568?s=20
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I know the UK is in transition. We still left the EU in January though.
This got my interest until I saw the price and I thought it was expensive. However, I just had a quick look at how much BT charge for their āPremiumā email service which does not even have two-factor authentication in 2020, and it seems reasonable. BT charge Ā£7.50 per month for this service. For those who donāt know, the service is mainly for customers changing broadband provider and who wish to keep their btinternet.com address. Ā£7.50 per month for a very basic and insecure email service!
Extortionate. There should be no reason for anyone to pay that for an appreciable period of time. Open new account, move everything over, keep old one for month or two if youāre worried youāve missed something, but it should be clear soon enough that nothing more is coming in and you can bin it off.
Heck, with sites like Facebook and LinkedIn around these days, it should still be possible for people to contact you in the event that they havenāt kept up with your change. Having a paid service is just taking advantage of (ex-)customerās naievity.
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It goes way back, to the days when a hotmail address, for example, would not be accepted by organisations, who demanded a ārealā address, i.e. isp domain. it was orginially Ā£1.50 a month to keep the address. The need to do so was more compelling then. As you say, Ā£7.50 is extortion, and more likely a device to try and keep customers. Nobody should be using an isp address as primary nor should they be using a service that does not offer 2FA as a primary email. Primary email is the master key to our digital lives. Only the best should do.
Iāve been using Hey for the last week in a bit more earnest now, after forwarding my normal emails over.
Itās so refreshing being able to filter pretty much everything out.
The Screening is probably the best thing for this service. And sure you can do that with filters etc in Gmail, but this is frictionless.
I just went in to my Hey inbox after not looking at it since Friday evening. I had 45 ānew sendersā waiting to be screened. 16 of them went straight to my āscreened outā list, and Iām still deciding on where the others should go. But itās great that I never have to deal with that level of spam in this inbox.
The three different views; Imbox, Feed, Paper Trail are similar to Googleās Important / Promotions / Updates filters (except you manually select these for now).
The good side of this selection, is that you can direct things how you want, not how the Filter wants, but the down side is itās done on a per sender basis, so anyone who sends both their newsletters and order confirmations from the same address, would end up in the same place.
I hope in future that changes to have a bit more AI to it.
The one thing I donāt like is the visual display of āThe Feedā - itās literally a instagram or facebook style view with mini cards representing your emails. Iād like that to be a bit more customisable, at least to change the size, or flip to list mode if I am trying to find something specific I saw a few days ago.
Otherwise I think itās great so far.
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Signed up for the trial today myself, and so far Iām loving it. Going to give it a few more days and transfer some more emails over to identify any potential issues before buying in.
The first week of my trial, I didnāt mange to actually use Hey much, as there was a little delay from siging up, setting up forwarding, and then starting to use it in earnest as emails started trickling through.
I really like the Screener too, particularly the way you can choose to send something to the Feed or the Paper Trail direct from the Screener instead of having to send them to the Imbox first.
The Paper Trail hasnāt proved as effective as Iād hoped, but thatās largely down to companies using the same address for āother emailsā as they do for receipts 
. Most cases Iāve been able to get around it by changing the setting back to Imbox for that sender, and then turning on the āBundlingā option (perhaps my favourite part of the service; bundling is absolutely brilliant).
I like the visual display of the Feed as it is - functionally it reminds me of the Google Reader - and I think it works well for newsletters and some marketing emails. But it would be a lot more useful if I could have more than one Feed - so I could put book related stuff in one feed, music related stuff in another, maybe one more for events, etc. That would make using it more effective for me.
I got an email from Hey asking how I was getting on, so I replied saying much what Iāve done above, mentioned that the first week of my trial had been kind of ādeadā in allowing me to determine anything, and they added an extra week on for me. I think by the end of that extra week I may be seriously tempted to pay for an account (Iām not quite there yet, itās one of those situations where I find one really does need to make full and proper use of the service for a decent time to judge).
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The $99/year price point is definitely an interesting one. The functionality is so good Iām genuinely considering it, but not without a massive wince.
I wonder if theyād get more bites at a lower price.
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I was very excited about it and really like some of the ideas theyāre bringing to the table. But ultimately my email workflow is so heavily ingrained at this point that it just didnāt work for me.
The idea of the feed is great but in practice I just prefer seeing a list of my email and opening the ones Iām interested in rather than having them all half open and having to scroll more.
The paper trail also sounds great but Gmail search works well enough for me when I need something.
I really do like the files view and am hoping that this is something Gmail could easily add.
Iām also just a big fan of archive to keep my inbox clean. All the emails just staying in the Imbox picks at my OCD.
The screener is a great feature, no question. But a few years back I went through the hassle of unsubscribing from loads of crap that Iād signed up for over time and found annoying. I donāt really get email I donāt want now and I find Gmails spam filter to be very very good.
I do love the privacy features and how dedicated they are to blocking tracking pixels. I also just like Basecamps ethics and philosophy and would gladly pay them the annual sub if it worked for me.
Lastly, I got my real name! I paid for a Gmail invite back in the day and still didnāt manage to get any reasonable variation of my name. Iām so tempted to pay just to keep that forever but I think Iām gonna pass.
TLDR: I really do like what theyāre doing and donāt have an issue with the price, but it just doesnāt really suit me.
How does the forwarding work for you? Iām concerned Iād just deluge myself with all the existing Gmail junk I have.
It works out just short of Ā£95 at the current exchange rate. Its a lot for an email service.
Im holding out on a rival service onmail to see what their pricing is like. They first announced their plans back in April but thereās no mention of their āfreemiumā offering just yet. They can be followed on Twitter @getonmail if youāre interested
Iāve found it pretty good - Iāve just screened out the forwarded stuff I donāt care about, and that seems ok so far. Really should just go back and unsubscribe on the gmail side too.
Iāve subscribed after the trial, and like it although I donāt think the workflow has quite clicked for me yet. The feed is great for newsletters etc., but I have a lot of things filtered into the papertrail and suspect thatās not the right way to do it (donāt want them in the feed and theyāre not important, so?). Feels like it needs an āunboxā alongside the āimboxā? i.e. for things that arenāt receipts, arenāt newsletters, but arenāt important either. Or am I missing something?
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Yeah agree with the forwarding - itās been great so far. My issue with my gmail account was just the sheer volume so the screener helps with that.
A problem I found was how quickly stuff fills up so I would just let it pile up and delete on mass. So I can stop my inbox filling better.
Itās not perfect - but for now it means I know the important stuff is where I left it and the āstatusā of my inbox hasnāt changed drastically.
Iām still trying to get familiar with The Feed - Iām not sold on the infinite scrolling layout - just feel like Iāll never get to the bottom of it, and while it might be full of newsletters, if thereās one I want to get to itās not the most convenient.
But, on the whole, itās positive and I look forward to custom domains soon.
Does the read email part of the inbox just keep getting bigger and bigger or do old emails get archived / deleted?
And how easy is it to search for old emails? (As good as Gmail?)
I started out thinking Ā£100 for email was ridiculous, but now Iāve looked at it Iām temptedā¦
Yes it keeps getting bigger unless you delete them. It is a very natural flow once you start allowing this to happen. Search seems decent but canāt really compare with Gmail until there are thousands of emails in there.
Thanks, thatās reassuring - I may have to sign up for the trial now 
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Sounds like the issue I ran into. As I said, I solved it by letting them back into the Imbox but bundled the sender. So now it doesnāt matter how many emails I get from, say, Humble Bundle. Be it one or ten, itās still only one line in the Imbox. That strikes the balance of hiding the cruft but still having enough visibility if thereās anything important (as opposed to the Paper Trail, which is essentially all hiding and no visibility).
If thereās a specific one you want to get to, canāt you search for it instead? But I understand your issues in general, and itās not at all dissimilar from my reasons for wanting several targeted feeds instead of one big one. When I started I was generous about what went in the Feed; now Iām picky about what goes in and have taken a lot out again, partially to avoid the bottomless issue.
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Sure for specifics ones - but actually I think itās rare that I would be looking for a known specific thing.
Since there are some newsletters I might want to read with more urgency than others, the view here makes it hard to do that. Part of that is probably behaviour carried over from old habits, but I think there will always be stuff in the newsletter bucket that I want to read more readily than others. Like small independent shops with their monthly mail out vs Strava or something with a more frequent less informative thing that I still want to read, at some point.
I think itās just that bit of stuff that falls through the cracks in the three buckets - not really well captured yet for me. But at least having a list view for the Feed would be nice
Iām about 10 days into a trial and Iāve decided itās not for me - and The Feed is the main reason. Iām sure it might evolve and change but it doesnāt work for me personally at all currently and at that price point Iām not prepared to pay on the basis it might improve.
There is a lot to like and if it was priced a bit lower I think Iād probably give it a go for longer while hoping The Feed inproved. The Screener is excellent.