After thinking aloud about HEY email over the past 10 days, and trying out Fastmail + Spark as an alternative, I’ve come to my conclusion: I’m going with HEY. The AMA they did helped dispel a lot of my concerns, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it develops.
Responses
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I came here for the Hey review, but I stayed for the nostalgia. Your site feels to me like a throwback to the “good old days” of blogging — thoughtful, straightforward writing on eclectic topics, without a bunch of ads and vacuous sponsored product reviews. The second paragraph of your Sidebar had me nodding along! Almost inspires me to bring back my old blog…
But I digress before I’ve begun. What specifically brought you back around to Hey? Part 2 of your review raises the same issues that I’ve struggled with: having to proactively check my Feed / Paper Trail / spam, and the difficulty of clearing “read” or uninteresting items from the Feed because I don’t need them anymore and they’re burying the stuff I haven’t gotten to.
Spark looks interesting, if a bit busy. Did you not like it?
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The other problem I had with Hey was that I felt like they don’t put any effort into helping you transition from your old email service. Chiefly, there’s no way to import your old email (of which I have 20 years’ worth), and they say they won’t ever add that.
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Hey, thanks for the kind comments! I tell myself I keep writing here as a service to my future self (who will no doubt forget many of these things ever happened), but it’s always fantastic to hear that it helps someone else in any way.
For HEY, a number of things came together. I stopped getting mislabeled spam, but it could change as my new email address starts circulating and the volume increases. I also updated my email on many of the services I use often, and decided for myself which ones went in which box. I’m happy enough with the system now. I have given a few favorite newsletters permission to enter the Imbox, and when I’m done with them I file them in The Feed. It works.
The Feed: because of its limitations, and my desire to not miss important newsletters, I took the opportunity to unsubscribe from a lot of marketing crap that I’d tolerated before and just kept receiving and deleting. So it’s a bit of a Marie Kondo effect… the process of adoption/migration forced me to change myself. Not so much what HEY does as what it made me do.
Spark’s great, but I guess it was Gmail I wanted to get away from. I do feel conflicted about having 16 years of email history parked there and not in HEY, but as long as I keep my Google account alive, it’ll still be there. I’ll take it year on year. If ever I leave HEY, I can export my history and combine it with a Gmail export someday, somewhere else.
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Makes sense, thanks for getting back to me! I actually want to subscribe and use Hey just to support them and see where it goes, because I love their philosophy and I think they have some good ideas. Honestly, I feel like the biggest mental hurdle to switching is just having to get people used to my new email address.
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sangsara.net 
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