SMF·HEY-EMAIL
Can a prompt replace HEY?
Email — consumer email service
Exhibit tracking slip
Verdict
Running your own global email service is not something to attempt casually — deliverability, spam reputation, and abuse handling are real infrastructure, and a solo rebuild mostly just means your mail lands in spam. What is realistically buildable is HEY's best ideas — a screener for new senders, bundled newsletters, a reply-later queue — as a client over a mailbox you already trust.
Exhibit A — The prompt
Received on30.07.2026Do not try to run your own email service — deliverability and spam reputation are genuine infrastructure, and a solo rebuild of that layer mostly ends with your own mail landing in spam. Instead, build HEY's best ideas as a client over a mailbox you already trust and pay for (Fastmail or Gmail both work over IMAP). Connect over IMAP for reading and SMTP for sending, credentials from the environment. Build 'the screener': mail from a sender you haven't approved before lands in a review queue where you approve or block them once, and that decision applies to all their future mail automatically. Group approved senders into categories so newsletters render as a batched feed and receipts land in a separate paper-trail view, keeping the main inbox for people only. Add a 'reply later' action that pins a thread to a persistent stack until you clear it. Write screening decisions back as IMAP folders or labels so a phone's own mail app roughly mirrors the same sorting. Strip remote images from the reading pane by default.
Do not build your own SMTP server, a custom email domain, or native mobile apps — those either need infrastructure this project shouldn't take on, or are real platform work beyond a personal client.Opening prefills the prompt — press enter to run it.
Exhibit B — What you lose
- B.1 HEY's own deliverability and spam-reputation systems
- B.2 abuse handling for a mailbox you don't run yourself
- B.3 the mobile apps
- B.4 a custom @hey.com identity
Prior art
Exhibit C — Why people still pay: deliverability/compliance/infrastructure
Email is infrastructure — deliverability and sender reputation are the actual product, and neither is something a personal project builds in a weekend, or safely at all.
Questions
Can I bring over my existing email and contacts?
Yes — this connects to your existing mailbox over IMAP, so your mail, folders, and contacts are already there; nothing needs to be exported or migrated.
Will it work on my phone?
The screening and sorting decisions sync back as IMAP folders, so a phone's regular mail app roughly reflects them, but there's no dedicated mobile app with HEY's own screener and bundle views.
What does it actually cost to run?
Hosting for the small web client, plus whatever your underlying mailbox already costs — often less than HEY's own price, since you're not paying for their infrastructure.
What's the one thing that doesn't survive the rebuild?
Trustworthy email infrastructure that isn't your problem. HEY's team handles deliverability, spam, and abuse at scale; here, you're still fundamentally dependent on your underlying mailbox provider for all of that, same as before.
Related tools
Receipt