Is anybody using HEY for Domains?
Hi everyone, I have a quick couple o'questions since a friend of mine recommended HEY email and I'm not opposed to trying new things, even if I can think of better people to support than DHH.
Specifically, I'm thinking of moving my personal email, which is currently three addresses on the same domain, to HEY. So my questions are as follows:
Extensions let me make an infinite number of domains on the same domain. Like, hello@example.com, delphi@example.com, hi@example.com and so on. All of my questions are related to this mechanic.
- Can I start an email exchange from an extension?
- If not, if I reply to an email that came in on an extension, will I reply with said extension?
- Can I filter emails by the extensino they came in on?
- Can I set a catch-all that will any email to any extension come in, even if it's not explicitly set up?
Thanks in advance.
Best,
d
Edit after just trying it: It does do all of the things I described, including Catch-All email, although it's clearly not a primary use case and they discourage you from using it. It works just fine though.
I am not using HEY for this, but I do use PurelyMail and it is a small fraction of the cost that is listed on HEY. My expenditure for multiple domains is usually around $10-15 USD per year. That said, it is purely an email solution and works best as the front end for an email application like Thunderbird.
I use it by setting up emails like [servicename]@[domain] so I can sign up for a service like netflix with an email like netflix@mydomain.ca. Those emails just forward to my primary email. I can have any amount of them, and I've never had any increase in cost. I also can set up a catchall and give rules about what to do with the emails that are caught. It's pretty straightforward, but not perfect; the UI for management can be a bit clunky. However, I've never had any issues with it, and it is wildly inexpensive.
Edit: this may be off topic, because it doesn't directly answer your question, but I figured saving upwards of $90/yr is worth the potential off-topic comment, if this suits your needs
So am I. I currently use a classic email service that just gives me bog standard IMAP/SMTP. This is good, but it's not exactly modern or great. I trust the friend who recommended HEY to me a lot, and he recommended it specifically because of the unique features and the non-traditional metaphor of messaging HEY uses compared to classical email.
Oh sorry I should have been more explicit. I did try HEY out and I found the secret sauce to just be ketchup. Or to get off the metaphor, it was not significantly different from just being proactive with a standard email experience. I think that what HEY does do is have a bunch of quite reasonable filters for things that are important to see, important to keep but not necessarily review, and things you can do without. But with a bit of forethought, most of that special sauce boiled down to effective management of your domain emails and then unsubscribing from things you don't care about. But YMMV, and it's possible that the "bring your own domain" version of HEY adds something that I'm not aware of; I only did the @hey.com trial, and it wasn't particularly recent.
That said, my bias is against using Hansson's services so I may not have given it a fair shake.
Edit: that's why I marked my original as off-topic - I had only used the non-domains version - but I realized after re-reading that I actually insinuated that I didn't use it at all.
I admittedly hadn't even heard of HEY until now so I can't be that useful. I will say, though, that Mailbox (formerly called Mailbox.org and still on that TLD), supports all of that for a lot less money and is presumably less fashy than dhh. They are lacking some of the other features HEY apparently has, but it might be worth looking into. For example, I set up a custom <company>@<my domain>.<my tld> for (almost) every site I sign up for. It's just a catch-all, so it works automatically. At least using Thunderbird, I can reply from any of those subdomains. I'm not sure if replying from catch-all domains works directly on the Mailbox site or in iOS mail, the other two places I use it, but if you set those up as specifically named mailboxes then it definitely does.
Thanks for the recommendation, but if I just "change mail servers", my workflow won't actually change. I have it on good authority from a colleague I massively respect that the "special sauce" (screening emails, auto-sorting and so on) is a meaningful departure from the classical Email experience to the point where it'll actually make my life easier.
I have a similar setup on Fastmail (all four of the steps you listed) and it works pretty great. Making sure that I understood correctly what you meant for each step:
hi@kwyjibo.com. I can send the first email from this address immediately after I create it.hi@kwyjibo.com, whether or not your first email was sent using that address.hi@kwyjibo.comand all your emails would either have a tag (labels, as Fastmail calls them) that you set, or placed inside a folder you created.delphi@kwyjibo.cominstead ofhi@kwyjibo.com, you’d still receive their email, even if you’ve never set updelphi@kwyjibo.combefore.