Hey, there’s new stuff!

Android: improved clips

We improved ‘clipping’ text to save for later in HEY for Android. As text is highlighted, a larger easier-to-tap ‘Save clip’ button appears.

Android: search history

HEY for Android remembers what you recently searched for. This is especially handy when you’re often searching for the same types of emails. This search history is only on your device, and you can easily clear terms by tapping the X.

Android: offline paper trail

HEY for Android now allows you to save Paper Trail emails from the past 30 days offline. Tap your profile picture then select Saved for offline. When your connection is unreliable, you’ll always have access to your emails saved offline.

Android: home screen shortcuts

Long-press the HEY app icon on your home screen (or app drawer) for shortcuts to New message, The Feed, and Paper Trail. You can also drag and drop these shortcuts — The Feed for instance — from the menu onto your home screen for quick access.

name tags

Email signatures are a mixed bag. A lot of people need them for legal reasons, but does anyone really enjoy getting an email with a signature that looks like an early, unedited draft of War and Peace? No.

We wanted to keep the good and minimize the bad, so we made a little feature we call Name Tags. They’re like the Twitter of email signatures. 150 characters max, no images, minimal formatting. Just enough flexibility to get the job done while ensuring that your email is mostly email.

Android: multi-account switching

Use Android? Have multiple HEY accounts? Buckle up friend, because we just added a fast account switcher to our Android app. Once it’s set up (via the app settings), a single tap on your avatar toggles between accounts.

outbound spam detection

Part of running an email service is dealing with spam. Not only do we need to prevent spam from reaching your account, we also need to make sure that people can’t abuse HEY to send spam. So we rolled out a system to detect and quarantine HEY accounts that are looking decidedly spammy. It makes HEY a better email citizen and helps ensure your emails don’t get flagged as spam by association.

Android: custom swipe actions

By default, swiping left or right marks an email as Seen or Unseen. Now you can customize the swipe behavior in all sorts of ways. Prefer that a left swipe moves something to the Set Aside box? You can do that. Want to put something in the Reply Later box when you swipe right? You can do that too. Swipe right to like this message.

iOS: home screen widgets

You know what’s better than a HEY iOS app? A HEY iOS app with widgets. Know what’s better than widgets? Widgets that come with a bunch of different themes to match the various HEY app icons. Details. 🌈

iOS: default email app

If you’re running iOS 14, you can now set HEY as your default email app. That means any mailto links will automatically open in HEY instead of mail.app.

web: accessible row navigation

We shipped a batch of accessibility improvements that make navigating rows of messages in HEY much easier to use for people who rely on screen readers and/or keyboard navigation.

Android: print emails

Someone once said that the difference between a toy and a real computer is determined by whether you can print from it. We added the ability to print emails in HEY for Android, so congrats, you’ve got a handheld computer now.

iOS: custom app icons

The default HEY app icon uses our trademark blurple color, but what if you’re not a blurple fan? This one’s for you. Now you can pick from a whole slew of app icons to make HEY vibe with your aesthetic.

ARC signing

ARC (Authenticated Received Chain) signing is our latest effort in making sure that emails you send land in inboxes, not spam folders. It’s like a chain of custody for forwarded emails that lets all the servers involved know that your email really is from you and not someone spoofing your address. A positive change for everyone except purported Nigerian princes.

Android: richer notifications

If you turn on notifications for threads or senders, we now show even more good stuff without having to open the HEY app. Now we show the sender’s photo, their name, and a more robust summary of the email.

Android: actionable notifications

HEY for Android v1.0.11 brings a trio of enhancements:

• You can mark emails as Seen, Reply Later, or Set Aside right from the notification. Super fast, super useful.
• There’s now a check to make sure your Android device can cut the mustard. If it’s not going to work, we’d rather be clear and up front about it.
• The HEY menu is displayed in the other boxes too.

iOS: HEY menu everywhere

HEY for iOS v1.0.7 comes packed with a bunch of new stuff:

• Access the HEY menu from more places — now you can quickly jump between The Feed, Paper Trail, Reply Later, Set Aside, and All Files using the HEY menu.
• Even more iPad keyboard shortcuts.
• Share sheet for your emails — handy for grabbing a link, printing an email, kicking off a shortcut workflow, and much more.

bundle items in the Paper Trail

HEY’s Paper Trail is a great place to stick all those receipts that you need to keep but don’t want clogging up your Imbox. We just rolled out a new feature that makes it even better. Now, you can bundle receipts from the same sender into a single row and cut the clutter even more.

iOS: share anything

HEY iOS v1.06 dropped with two great new features:

• Share almost any file from other apps to HEY when using the system share sheet. Sharing is caring.
• Choose your web browser — now you can choose whether you want links to open right within HEY, with Safari, or with other browsers like Firefox.

Imbox notifications for everything

We think notifications for everything is a bit much, but some folks really do need them. That’s why we just rolled out a way to turn on notifications for every single thing that lands in your Imbox in one fell swoop. Click your avatar, select “notifications”, then flip the “Imbox notifications” toggle to make it happen.

sent mail view

Feeling reflective? Ever want to take a trip down memory lane and see what emails past you sent? You’re in luck, because we just rolled out a new feature that let’s you do exactly that. As a bonus, all the attachments you’ve sent are conveniently collected at the top.

Android: open attachments in your default app

You probably want to do something with the email attachments that you receive. HEY for Android has your back. PDFs, calendar invites, text, and HTML files now open directly in your device’s default app for those file types.

iOS: productivity enhancers

HEY for iOS v1.0.5 dropped with a slew of productivity enhancers and customer requested features. Now you can:

• access Clips, Drafts, and Contacts from the HEY menu
• quick preview .docx and .html attachments
• label, delete, and move items from a contact screen
• use keyboard shortcuts to quickly switch screens

web: dark mode toggle

HEY shipped with dark mode support, but it was controlled exclusively by the settings in your OS. Customers let us know that they prefer to mix and match light and dark mode, and we were happy to oblige. So now you can use HEY in light mode with your OS in dark mode and vice versa.

Android: long press actions + more

HEY for Android 1.0.7 rolled out with some handy new features and improvements:

• You can long press external links to display some contextual actions.
• You can open links in app or in your default browser.
• Polish was liberally applied to the UI.

web: better back behavior

One thing we’ve been hearing from customers is that they think of the “< Imbox” button as a kind of in-app back button. Problem is, when you’re looking at threads filed into The Feed and Paper Trail, hitting that button jumps you all the way back to the Imbox. It’s not the label, it’s the expectation.

To fix that, we deployed a change that shows “< Back” on the button and adjusts the URL to take you to either The Feed or the Paper Trail.

merge contacts

Let’s say you have two contacts that are actually the same person, and you’d like to merge them into one. Before, you’d be stuck with two entries. Now when you add an address to a contact that’s already in use, you get a prompt to merge. Click yes, and you’ve got one contact to rule them all.

Launch!

The day email changed for the better. LAUNCH DAY.