Was looking for a Gmail alternative, several months ago, and had to pick between these two.<p>I went with Fastmail and am very happy.<p>Tons of aliases that are easy to use, the UX is actually _much better_ than Gmail.
I don’t get Hey.<p>I feel like it does too much magic with my inbox.<p>Much like social media, I don’t want some algorithm to selectively decide what messages I see and what I don’t. I want to be able to see All messages, in a chronological order.<p>Having concert tickets not arrive in my inbox that I need because some magic is happening due to the sender being a first time sender to me is just frustrating.
I love how a bunch of the "headline features" of Hey are effectively replicated with taking the time to make a few rules in another platform. I tried Hey at the peak of it's pre-release hype, but just like Basecamp, it's just a really mediocre experience in a sea of options.
IMHO, services like Hey is for people who don't know how, or don't want to bother, to set proper inbox rules (it has many other features for sure but organizing emails is one of the biggest selling point as far as I see).<p>But for me, I just want a reliable, dumb, boring email service without any "smart" features. I will decide what to do with every type of incoming emails myself. Fastmail gives me exactly that.
I've also been using HEY for a year of personal email, and just renewed my subscription.<p>I spend a lot of time organizing and managing email at work. I have multiple inboxes, hundreds of tags, filter rules etc.<p>When I tried HEY for my personal gmail, it just felt like a breath of fresh air. They were wrapping friendly UX around the realities of modern email. It wasn't "work" to manage my email.<p>I recognize their system is limited if you <i>want</i> to do that stuff - not sure I'd use HEY for work yet - but if you're inundated with email (as I was, having a gmail address dating back to beta), they do a great job of making it manageable without any effort on your part.
I also implemented a vaguely Hey-inspired system in Fastmail a year ago and it's been good.<p>One tweak that's really helped me: when I filter things to "The Feed", I also use the filter to snooze them until 6pm, so I only get mailing list emails once at a day.
Just this week I started looking into Gmail alternatives (as well as de-Googling myself as much as possible) and while I haven't pulled the trigger on anything yet, Fastmail is looking like the top contender at the moment.<p>Hey was on the table for a bit, but no matter how much I read about their alternative workflow, I just don't understand how it would be an improvement over my typical method of archiving emails as I get through them. My email is essentially just a to-do list. Once I've dealt with something, into the archive it goes, and I don't think about it again unless it shows up in a search result when I'm looking for something later.<p>I've just never had a problem with it so I don't see a need to reinvent the wheel and learn a new method of using email.
Every time I read this type of post I get amazed at how primitive my use of personal email is.<p>No folders, no tags, no rules. Just inbox and read status.<p>Ditched gmail for iCloud a few years ago. Simple, cheap, well integrated.
I still pay for Fastmail, yet I route all messages over to HEY. There's just no replicating the UX (Fastmail's web UI is…suboptimal…and I'm thoroughly over using Apple Mail). And there are a <i>ton</i> of neat little touches throughout HEY beyond just the immediate filtering of incoming messages. It's simplistic to think you can just add a few rules on some other system and you're done.<p>I seriously thought about quitting after the Basecamp fiasco, but ultimately realized my entire email workflow is now centered around HEY and it's greatly improved my quality of life. So I use it like I use any other online service from a company I don't particularly like. _shrug_
For everyone who likes HEY’s workflow and wants to use it with Fastmail, Big Mail just launched this week and looks promising. I haven’t tried it yet (and no connection), but planning to give that combination a whirl when I have some time. Very curious if anyone else already has.<p><a href="https://getbigmail.com/" rel="nofollow">https://getbigmail.com/</a>
> I researched several different services that could provide a good enough service for a reasonable price and ended up settling on Fastmail.com.<p>The author also talks about saving a lot of money every year. There are cheaper alternatives to Fastmail that support custom domains and have a focus on privacy. Mailbox.org and Runbox.com are a couple of them. There are more.
I signed my wife and I up for Hey as soon as they offered a business plan, and although it's kind of expensive we've been very happy with it. But it's good to know that someone has tried the off-ramp.<p>Besides the simple routing, I just like the Hey app interface across macOS/iOS/web. The Gmail app never played nice with sending from my custom domain, and I will never subject myself to Apple's buggy mail app again. So I'm curious if there are other mail apps Fastmail users like on iOS/macOS.
Hey is an awesome email client on a terrible email server and Fastmail is an awesome server with a terrible client. I only wish there was a standard protocol we could use to mix and match!
I’ve been very happy using Helm home email server and it’s made me a bit of a snob about hosted Gmail alternatives - these companies still have access to all your email and while I am not a big fan of Google’s business model I’m personally not comfortable having my email on any corporate server.<p>(No affiliation with Helm just a happy customer for more than a year and hoping they succeed.)
I love Hey. Completely revolutionized email for me.
I hated it before, now it’s a joy to use.
It’s really cool this guy documented and shared all His steps to switch over to fast mail.