HEY Email

• Free

Last verified 6 Aug 2026

4.7 4323 ratings · App Store

1. 5/5Great step forward in email

   From my perspective, this is the first serious step forward in email since Google popularized threading with Gmail. The three-part organizational scheme (inbox, newsletter feed, and receipt box) works remarkably well. The screener is a great way of reducing clutter. The ability to change subjects and merge threads has come in useful several times. And adding notes and setting aside clips—both features contribute to productivity. The privacy features are also valuable and may be the clincher for some, but they mostly work in the background. It amazes me that something this polished sprung forth fully formed, as if from the brow of Zeus. And on top of that, the interface is really pretty. A few aspects (the domain name and the term “imbox”) feel a bit gimmicky, but don’t meaningfully detract from the product’s excellence. One tiny complaint: the threading seems to be based on some identifier distinct from subject lines and senders. When friends create new threads my “replying all” to old threads, clearing out the prior emails, and changing the subject line, Hey lumps them in with the old threads on which they are based. Given the frequency with which my friends (who seem not to have discovered email groups) start new threads using old ones, this is leading to some pretty monstrous threads. But that’s a small issue.

   Charles Morse · 6 Aug 2026

2. 5/5Finally a privacy-respecting inbox

   I was one of the first users of Gmail, getting in on the first round of beta invites that went out. I was so enthusiastic about a company bringing the concept of email out of the Stone Age. But as the decades passed, Google dropped the ball. They dropped the “do no evil” mentality in favor of the bottom line. We all learned, the hard way, that advertising-based companies like Google and Facebook don’t care about their users, they care about advertisers. Because there’s no such thing as a free ride, and on free platforms, your attention and data are what is being sold, to marketers. Finally, Hey is here to reinvent email again, and this time for the better. Yes, Hey is a subscription service. And that’s a good thing. That means they don’t have to sell their souls, and your information, to survive. They have an actual, ethical business model. On top of that they protect you by filtering out those nasty tracking “pixels” in emails that let marketers know a scary amount of detail about you, including how many times you opened their emails, at what times, roughly where (geographically) and on what types of devices. And there’s so much more to love about Hey. The Screener, the Imbox, the Paper Trail, Reply Later, Focus & Reply, global files browsing- I can go on and on. I’m thrilled to be a Hey customers, and I think you will be too.

   Evan Sims · 6 Aug 2026

3. 5/5Love this email.

   I haven’t been this excited to use an email app since email came into existence. I love that I get to choose where emails go when they come in - I think my Imbox will be less cluttered overall except that I really like to tag things for later or “set aside” so I can see that turning into a parking lot of disaster for me…at least I can easily locate things I wanted to look at for some reason. Will I have to pay for it? Yes. I’m also okay with that because it will be money well spent! Glad I stumbled on this when trying to find a new platform to replace Gmail. Also stoked that I can forward other inboxes instead of filling loading all of the garbage. My hotmail has over 200k unread emails. Who can even deal with that?!?

   Delka76 · 6 Aug 2026

4. 3/5Okay, but needs improvement

   I’ve been a subscriber since launch, and there’s a lot of things I like about Hey, but it’s lacking some basics that really hurt and are far behind other “free” email services. For one, the way Hey handles downloading files is awful. If you are emailed you several files, you cannot download them all at once or even select which ones to download from a list. You have to click each one manually, wait for it to load, then download it to your computer. Imagine doing this for a bunch of documents you need to fill out, rather than using select boxes/check marks and downloading the lot. Another major issue is how Hey handles drafts. I repeatedly lose the content to my draft messages. I don’t remember this being such a problem previously, so it may be related to an update, but I’ve been losing work and time due to this, and it’s really unacceptable in an email client to lose drafts. Finally, there needs to be more sorting/limiting options available when referencing previous emails or searching to find one that’s buried. There also doesn’t seem to be any searching done within files attached to emails, which is only a minor issue for me, but still crops up as problematic. Using Hey since it’s launch on the App store has been pleasant, but also been made abundantly clear that I cannot use Hey to replace my other email clients until they’ve upped their game in usability and reliability. I’ve paid for two years, but I’m not sure if I’ll stick around for a third just yet.

   Nato510 · 6 Aug 2026

5. 3/5Nice design ... but not a fit for business email

   No custom domains (are business users to promote your domain instead of theirs on all email sent and received - I know it is announced for future but at least you could have changed the email address in to/from/reply-to headers), no folders (how’s a giant inbox going to work after many 1000s of emails if you need to search for an email of a year ago ), completely captive service (how will you get your data out when you leave the service since it’s only on their server?), no read receipts (spying? Nothing more than bringing email on par with chat apps). Anyone who claims these features are ‘revolutionary’ are uninformed. Take a look at Polymail, Newton, Spark etc who’ve had similar functionality for years AND are compatible with existing email services. But 5 stars for great marketing : create artificial scarcity with a waitlist, and free viral marketing from a public rift with Apple.

   Techexpert007 · 6 Aug 2026

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