There’s a new mailing client in town and it’s called Hey. The hosted email service has been created by Basecamp and it has taken them over two years to make it public. This week, the company’s’ CEO talked about the platform and how it plans to simplify e-mails. Its basic principle is to give back control of the mails to the account holder. It wants to get rid of spams, unwanted mails and let users choose which mail and which sender should be mailing them in the future.
They have integrated trackers to make sure the attackers don’t get access to your original mail details. Instead, using its hosted servers, Hey will push out a random address to confuse the hackers. They are offering Imbox, wherein ‘Im’ standards for important. The mailing client works on a different standard, which means you’ll never be able to import emails from other clients. You can also not integrate your Gmail or Outlook ID to the Hey mail ID, keeping it exclusive for the user.
Hey is available with a 14-day free trial right now, after which you will have to pay $99 (Rs 7,500 approx) for one year which gives you 100GB data storage. They don’t have any monthly plans as of now, but importantly, Hey says the mails are not end-to-end encrypted which could be a red flag for many users out there. As of now, Hey is only signing up people with access to their special invites, and as we’ve seen in the past, such initiatives bring more eyeballs. No wonder Hey has got over 50,000 people on the waiting list, who’ll probably have to wait for another week or so.
And among all this, Hey will offer premium (yes, pricier) mail account options wherein your ID character limit can be two or three words. So while the standard mail account is priced at $99, users with fancy choices can pay $349 for one year and $999 for one year to get mail IDs such as ‘kt@hey.com’ and ‘ani@key.com’ respectively.
So if you’re really keen on going for another mail ID, Hey (with the invite, of course) is worth trying. If not, better to stick with other clients available in the market without charging a bomb and not wanting an invite to sign in.