Most people started with a Hotmail or Gmail, however, even though the UI has been “improved” the backend is the same, some even went further an implement Artificial Inteligence (AI) to analyze and “prioritize” your emails based on your profile (hello Google!), analyzing every piece of your emails sent and received.
Today, 30 years later, a lot of technologies improved for the best most interestingly the email backend has not changed much, well not until hey.com, onmail.com and superhuman.com arrived.
What this new service proposed?
Hey, OnMail and Superhuman are all email services done right (maybe?); The three services have a unique set of skills and functions that make them in some way unique and more powerful than the average email services out there.
Superhuman
Not recommended — why? — let’s say that it’s like an Outlook for Gmail, it will add genuinely nice set of features (mostly Inbox-Zero), but it depends 100% on Gmail to work as it needs to connect to it to work, it’s also the more expensive of the bunch, $30/month. As the service is ridiculously expensive, I refuse to even evaluate it, so I’ll not drive deep into this one. — UI it’s beautiful -
OnMail
Created by Edison Mail, an extremely popular email client that allows you to connect a few emails accounts into their app. For starter, you can get a free account [user@onmail.com], it allows you to connect your own domain, or you can get one for free when signing up with any of the pro plans, anyhow, here are some of the main features they offered:
- Accept/Block emails from a sender.
- Inbox-Zero methodology.
- Split Inbox, separate the emails in some sort of collections (see Primary and Other below, you can create your own).
- They built many of Edison Mail AI functions in the OnMail, like recognizing travel (flight ticket, hotels) emails, packages (delivery services, UPS, Amazon), even Price Tracking.
Hey
Now, let’s talk about my favorite, Hey. Let’s mud some water first, its entry ticket cost $99/year, no hidden cost, no features require a later payment. You can evaluate it for free for 15 days, this should be enough for you to decide whenever the way they do things are of liking.
Why Hey is so expensive?
— Let start by its an email service that does not work as any email service that you know about. Basecamp the company behind Hey creates their own way of doing things, they don’t go by trends; they do not build the same wheel; they do really put out their own methodology for their product.
What methodology?
— First, forget about Inbox-Zero, the Inbox and the one thousand unread emails. Hey, does not use Inbox-Zero (Jason Fried, Bootcamp CEO has stated before this before), the Inbox is called Imbox, and this is not a typo and in Hey methodology your email is yours, so no tracking from Ads company — aka Google, Mailchimp and a lot of others
Want some more?
— User first decide if a recipient is accepted or not, and they also choose where the emails from that recipient go to, Imbox, The Feed or Paper Trail. Things on the Imbox are considered actionable or important Emails/Recipients, The Feed idea is for those emails that you like but are irrelevant if you look at them now, tomorrow — never? — and the Paper Trail where receipts go — good-bye bank receipts, electronic invoices, login to Facebook emails–.
What should you use?
I’ll say to leave Superhuman out, and it’s ridiculously expensive for what it offers. As for OnMail and Hey, they both offer a free tier or trial, so you can evaluate both services to see which one works best for you.
Personally, I think OnMail serves many things that Hey offer but at half the price, however; they lack mobile apps (lunching in the next 2 weeks, April 2021), there is not dark theme or 2 FA (2 Factor Authentication) (They are working on this too). But if you want to go all in and can put out the yearly price tag that Hey, ask for, I’ll say go for Hey, I’d not like about it, I’m biased towards it.
