HEY
Opinionated, consent-based email with The Screener, Imbox/Feed/Paper Trail, and tracker blocking.
About
HEY is 37signals' reinvention of email as a service, not a client: your mail lives in HEY's apps and you get an @hey.com address (or bring your own domain). The defining mechanic is The Screener — first-time senders never reach your inbox until you approve them. Mail then flows into the Imbox (important), the Feed (newsletters, read like a timeline), and the Paper Trail (receipts and confirmations). Everything is bundled by sender, tracking pixels are blocked and exposed, Reply Later and Set Aside replace folders, and an attachment library gathers every file you have ever received.
Pricing is simple: Personal $99/year; HEY for Domains $12/user/month. There is no free tier and no IMAP — you live in HEY's apps, which is the point for fans and the dealbreaker for skeptics. 37signals also open-sourced hey-cli for managing contacts and delivery routing from the terminal.
What it can do
- The Screener: approve senders before they reach you
- Imbox, Feed, and Paper Trail triage model
- Automatic tracker blocking with spy reports
- Attachment library and Reply Later / Set Aside
- hey-cli open-source terminal tool for contact routing
Setup
Sign up at hey.com, pick an @hey.com address or connect your domain, and screen your first senders.
Prerequisites
Willingness to work in HEY's apps (no IMAP); paid plan.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 8/10
Scored 8/10 (verified tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: 37signals' consent-based email: The Screener, Imbox/Feed/Paper Trail, tracker blocking, attachment library; Personal $99/yr; HEY for Domains $12/user/mo; no free tier, no IMAP (apps-only by design); basecamp/hey-cli open source confirms active development; opinionated model is the main adoption caveat. License: Proprietary service (37signals); hey-cli open-sourced on GitHub.
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 8.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 9.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 3.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 8.0/10
- · 37signals' consent-based email: The Screener, Imbox/Feed/Paper Trail, tracker blocking, attachment library
- · Personal $99/yr; HEY for Domains $12/user/mo; no free tier, no IMAP (apps-only by design)
- · basecamp/hey-cli open source confirms active development; opinionated model is the main adoption caveat
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.