Valera Kushnir

Hey Mail - Yikes?

My annual FastMail subscription expires in December and I have been paying for FM for 3 years now. If i stick around, this will be the 4th year. Somewhere in my drafts I have a blog post sitting about how much FM has improved my relationship with email and how much I was enjoying it. Recently I began thinking through if FM is the right subscription to keep forward and began doing research on the email market.

What do I need in email

It often feels like my usage of email and paying for it is a throwing money away. I have a work email that I use for my job and my friends seem to be completely happy using firstlast1223@gmail or something similar. Yet, here I am using purchased domain names, adding catch all addresses, and assigning a specific email to each service. But, overall, here is a simple list of features that I am looking for:

  1. Professional and short email handle.
  2. Shared calendars.
  3. Shared mailbox set up to share with my spouse.
  4. Ability to send and receive via personal domains.
  5. BONUS: my spouse and I use the same platform.

Yea, that's pretty much it. Looking at it now it all seems so simple!

Options

The first place I looked were the regular suspects: Gmail and Outlook. Both cost about the same for 2 users, and both require having the business version of the account to be separate from the personal one. That means using personal Gmail for YT and other services, while using Gsuite for the extra features. Very similar with Outlook as a personal Office 365 subscription cannot be changed into a business one.
I quickly abandoned Office business as an option due to how complex MSFT makes any account management. Google still remains an option, but kind of a last case scenario. If Gmail is where I end up going, that means I'm really going to stick with FastMail over that move.

I've also considered free versions of these services, but I can't get handles that accomplish my number 1 requirement. I feel like some time back I used to have firstlast@gmail but lost it. Emailing that address led nowhere.

Besides Gmail and Outlook other feasible options were Proton Mail and...FastMail. Again, FM is really awesome and there is a lot to like there. It's still an option, but I'm looking to try something different.
There are plenty of other email options from StartPage, to Posteo, to Tutanota...but all have cons, and considering that my ideal scenario is my spouse and I using the same platform, the learning curve might be too steep.

Here comes Hey

I've looked at Hey.com about a year ago, but dismissed it for being half baked and really expensive. Now, it has become...an option? Let's review:

  1. Professional and short email handle. - Yes, available!
  2. Shared calendars. - Yes!
  3. Shared mailbox set up to share with my spouse. - YIKES!
  4. Ability to send and receive via personal domains. - YIKES!
  5. BONUS: my spouse and I use the same platform. - Yes...?

I won't focus on the wins, but let's talk about the YIKES!

Yikes Number 1

Although Hey now offers a Family plan, it's not really a family plan. When you buy a 1Password for Families plan, it comes with a shared vault that allows you to share the passwords with others. FastMail allows to create a shared email address and a shared inbox for that address that other users on the account can utilize. I assumed that if Heys Family plan allows 4 accounts, that something like that would be viable and I grabbed an email handle for our family. But it turns out it's a feature that is completely missing. The best Hey offers right now is linking your 2nd email account to another account, but that is it, and you cannot share it beyond that.

The reason why this is a pretty big feature for us is because of school. We get emails from teachers and the school district, and a shared mailbox in FastMail allowed us to know that one of us has seen it and took action. We also used it to communicate with the school and it was easy keep up. Great use case for us and without this feature in Hey, we now need to identify if having 2 addresses for the school to use is a detriment or makes no difference at all.

Yikes Number 2

It's a big yikes mostly because of sticker shock. Currently, i pay $80/year with FastMail for 2 accounts and 3 domains. That's pretty good!
Hey would cost me $30/month for the same amount of domains. And it wouldn't cover my spouse (another $100). And each Hey account can only be associated with 1 domain, and no this is completely separate from Hey for Families.

Yikes Number 3

Hey doesn't import old email. And okay, I kind of get it, fresh start and all that. But I might have a receipt that I need to find from not so distant future. Or, a correspondence that I want to continue.
It's not the end of the world, but it feels like an unnecessary friction point and I think the reason behind it (fresh start) is a marketing attempt to cover the technical challenge. If users begin importing thousands of old emails, it doesn't fit neatly into The Hey Way.

In Summary

Hey is pretty cool. It's different and opinionated, and this blog post by Chris Coyier summarizes my feelings about the service SO WELL. It's missing features, and it's expensive. It has a learning curve and requires a buy in from my spouse.

I kind of rushed an paid even before my 30 day trial was up. I assumed that paying will give me that shared address, that shared environment that I was looking for. The customer service has been great, so hopefully they will hear me out if within a few weeks we identify that this is not for us.