Saying bye to Hey.

My Hey renewal is coming up next week and I'm moving back to Gmail because Hey lost a lot of my emails and blamed me.

So, there’s a fair bit to unpack here. First of all, there is a possibility that I am at fault here, I’ll acknowledge that right away, but due to the specific missing emails I am confident that this is not the case.

Hey is an email provider, a smaller paid alternative to to Gmail and Outlook. I was looking to reduce my reliance on Google and Hey seemed like a great option. $100 per year was a lot, but I was happy to give a go and properly evaluate it for a year. The idea of using a large Ruby on Rails app in my daily life was a really enticing.

It’s interesting that this has occurred just before my annual renewal. I was planning on staying with Hey for another year, I had made that decision. I had some small issues with workflows and it did take a bit of time to adjust to a new way of thinking about email, but they were just about outweighed by the benefits of not relying on Google for something and all the other amazing things that Hey brings to the table! On the detractor side, there is also the controversial statements made by a particular member of the 37 Signal’ leadership which is leading a lot of other people to move away from their products. I was trying to evaluate the product, not the company, but nothing operates entirely in a vacuum. Overall, Hey was winning my money.

Then I noticed that some emails were missing.

The emails in question, at least the ones that I noticed, were sent from a specific address. The contact in Hey was not set up for any recycling (one of their options to automatically delete old emails), and was automatically landing in the Imbox (the important emails part of their email client) where emails should stay. The emails in question were from our wedding venue. Really obvious, distinctive and important. These missing emails included payment confirmations, and important booking information that I have had to ask the venue to resend. This gives me the confidence to say that I did not delete them, move them to the feed or mark them as spam. I don’t really delete any emails from my Imbox.

As you would in such a situation, I reached out to their support. They were prompt to respond and investigated as much as they could, but the firm line was that I was at fault.

… but the only possibilities would be:

• If you accidentally deleted them, the emails would have then been deleted from our logs completely after 30 days
• If you accidentally moved the threads to the Feed, where you have Recycling activated (any emails older than 90 days would be recycled immediately once you move them to the Feed)
• If you somehow marked them as spam, where they would have deleted themselves automatically after 30 days

With the situations above, and except for the Recycling Center, Hey doesn’t have any mechanisms for deleting emails without user intervention. I’m sorry I don’t have better news for you here.

That’s would be enough to have me moving away from Hey even if my renewal wasn’t coming up. It’s also enough to make me want to share this as a lesson learned. Perhaps I was at fault. Perhaps I did accidentally delete important emails related to my wedding. I don’t have any other explanation but I don’t think so.