Most people started with Hotmail or Gmail, however, even though the UI has been “improved” the backend is the same, some even went further and implemented Artificial Intelligence (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, many technologies have improved for the better most interestingly the email backend has not changed much, well not until hey.com, onmail.com, and superhuman.com arrived.

What is this new service proposed?

Hey, OnMail and Superhuman are all email services done right (maybe?); The three services have differentiating features that make them unique and more powerful than the average email services out there.

Superhuman

Not recommended — why? — let’s say that it’s like Outlook for Gmail, it will add a 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 more expensive of the bunch, $30/month. As the service is ridiculously expensive, I refuse to even evaluate it, so I’ll not dive deep into this one. — The UI it’s beautiful -

OnMail

Created by Edison Mail, a trendy email client that allows you to connect a few email accounts into their app. For starters, you can get a free account [[email protected]], which allows you to connect your 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 offer:

• Accept/Block emails from a sender.
• Inbox-Zero methodology.
• Split Inbox, separate the emails into some sort of collections (see Primary and Other below, you can create your own).
• They built many Edison Mail AI functions in the OnMail, like recognizing travel (flight tickets, hotels) emails, packages (delivery services, UPS, Amazon), and even Price Tracking.

Hey

Now, let’s talk about my favorite, Hey. Let’s mud some water first, its entry ticket costs $99/year, with no hidden cost, and no features require a later payment. You can evaluate it for free for 15 days, this should be enough for you to decide what the way they do things is of liking.

Why Hey is so expensive?

— First of all, Hey is an email service that does not work like any email service that you know about. Basecamp the company behind Hey creates their way of doing things, they don’t go by trends; they do not build the same wheel; they do put out their methodology for their product.

What methodology?

— First, forget about Inbox-Zero, the Inbox, and the one thousand unread emails. Hey, do not use Inbox-Zero (Jason Fried, Bootcamp CEO has stated this before), the Inbox is called Imbox, and this is not a typo in Hey methodology your email is yours, so no tracking from Ads company — aka Google, Mailchimp and a lot of others

Want some more?

— Users first decide if a recipient is accepted or not, and they also choose where the emails from that recipient go, 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 — goodbye bank receipts, electronic invoices, log in 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.

I think OnMail serves many things that Hey offers but at half the price, however; they lack mobile apps (launching in the next 2 weeks, April 2021), there is no 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.