HEY

HEY is an email service built by 37signals — the company behind Basecamp — launched in June 2020 with the explicit goal of rethinking how email works rather than incrementally improving on Gmail. It introduced genuinely novel concepts: an Imbox (Important Inbox) that only receives mail from people you have explicitly screened in, a Feed for newsletters and subscriptions, a Paper Trail for receipts and notifications, and an intentional absence of read receipts and tracking pixels. HEY's approach to email is philosophical as much as technical — it treats email as a personal communication medium, not an attention economy.

The service launched to enormous demand and immediate controversy. Apple rejected the iOS app multiple times for not offering in-app purchase for subscriptions, sparking a public dispute between 37signals founder David Heinemeier Hansson and Apple that drew Congressional interest in App Store policies. Despite the drama, HEY attracted tens of thousands of subscribers and has maintained a vocal, loyal user base who find its opinionated workflow more calming than conventional email clients. 37signals runs HEY on its own infrastructure rather than on AWS or GCP, a deliberate architectural choice driven by the company's outspoken cloud scepticism.

When HEY goes down, the impact is total for active users: the web app becomes unreachable, mobile apps fail to sync new messages, and the screening workflow for new senders stops functioning. Because HEY handles SMTP delivery for custom domains, outages can also interrupt outgoing mail from users who send email from their own domain through the service. Push notifications stop arriving on mobile devices, and the Reply Later and Set Aside features become inaccessible.

Outage.gg monitors HEY email status with real-time community reports. If HEY is unreachable or mail delivery is broken, check the live status page to see whether it is a platform-wide incident.