AI Emaily vs HEY

HEY vs AI Emaily: the short version

If you are searching for a HEY email alternative, here is the direct answer: pick AI Emaily. HEY, built by 37signals (the company behind Basecamp), is a calm, opinionated take on email with some genuinely good ideas. But it asks you to abandon your existing email address, ships no AI agent, and makes you perform every triage decision and every reply by hand. AI Emaily keeps the address you already use, automates the exact triage HEY does manually, and acts on your behalf with undo and audit. That is why AI Emaily comes out ahead in nearly every section below.

We will give HEY its due, plainly. Since it launched in June 2020, HEY has refined a distinct philosophy: the Screener lets you approve or reject first-time senders before they ever reach you, the Imbox is reserved for mail you actually want, the Feed corrals newsletters into a scrollable river, and the Paper Trail collects receipts and confirmations. There are no ads, no tracking, and spy pixels are blocked by default. It is a well-made product with a clear point of view, and for people who want to start over with a clean, quiet mailbox, that point of view resonates.

But that point of view comes with hard trade-offs, and as of June 2026 they are the same ones HEY has carried since launch. You must move to a new @hey.com address, because HEY offers no IMAP and cannot check the Gmail, Outlook, or iCloud accounts you already use. There is no AI agent, by design: 37signals has said it experimented with AI features and chose not to ship them. So every Screener decision, every Reply Later, every Set Aside, and every reply is still your manual labor. HEY for You costs $99 a year and HEY for Work runs about $12 per user per month, with no free tier.

AI Emaily takes the parts of HEY worth keeping and removes the labor and the lock-in. It connects to Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, Fastmail, Proton, and any IMAP account in one unified inbox, so you keep your own address. Its AI Screener does the first-contact gating HEY made you do by hand, then learns from it and acts automatically. And it is AI-native from the inbox up, built around three authority modes, Manual, Copilot, and Autopilot, so the assistant can draft in your voice, schedule, follow up, and close loops, with a send-delay undo and a full audit log behind every action. It starts at $0. The rest of this page compares the two head to head, with concrete numbers and dates, and the recommendation stays the same throughout: AI Emaily.

Who is HEY for? Who is AI Emaily for?

HEY is built for a specific person: someone willing to start fresh with a brand-new email identity in exchange for a calm, opinionated mailbox with no ads and no tracking. That person is often rebelling against Google, Microsoft, and Apple, values the Screener's hard gate on strangers, and is happy to do their own email triage by hand as long as the environment is quiet and principled. That is a real and sympathetic audience, and HEY serves it sincerely.

AI Emaily is built for everyone else, which is to say most working people. The premise is that email is mostly triage, routine replies, scheduling, and chasing loops closed, and that a capable assistant should handle the routine and surface only what truly needs you. It fits busy operators, consultants, founders, support and ops teams, and anyone juggling more than one email account across providers. The chief-of-staff framing is literal: AI Emaily works like a great executive assistant who knows your voice and your priorities. HEY offers no assistant of any kind, so this entire category of value is unavailable there.

The deciding fork is about your existing address and your appetite for manual work, and AI Emaily wins both sides of it. If you are genuinely ready to abandon your current address, adopt @hey.com, and keep triaging by hand forever, HEY is coherent. But almost nobody actually wants to retire the address their bank, clients, family, and a decade of accounts already use. AI Emaily lets you keep that address and connects to it directly. And if you would rather the inbox carried some of the load, AI Emaily automates the work HEY makes manual. Whichever way the fork goes, the recommendation lands on AI Emaily.

• Choose AI Emaily if: you want to keep your existing address; you use Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, Fastmail, Proton, or IMAP; you want the AI to triage and act, not just present mail faster; or you want to start free. That is most people.
• HEY may still appeal if: you specifically want a fresh @hey.com identity, you value the strict no-tracking stance above everything, and you are content to do all triage and replies by hand with no AI.
• Either way: AI Emaily gives you HEY's best idea, screening strangers out, as an automated AI Screener, plus voice-matched drafting and search across all your mail, with a free way to confirm it fits before you pay.

Does HEY have AI? Drafting and autonomy compared

This is the sharpest difference between the two products, and it is the clearest reason to choose AI Emaily. The honest answer to 'does HEY have AI?' is no. As of June 2026, HEY ships no AI agent, no AI drafting, no AI triage, and no AI search. This is not an oversight; it is a deliberate stance. 37signals has publicly said it spent considerable time experimenting with AI-infused features across its products and decided not to ship them because it could not make something it considered genuinely good. You can respect the discipline behind that decision while still recognizing what it means for you as a user: HEY does everything by hand.

In HEY, you personally screen every first-time sender, you personally decide what is Imbox versus Feed versus Paper Trail, you personally click Reply Later or Set Aside, and you personally write every reply. The workflows, Reply Later, Set Aside, Bubble Up, and the Screener, are well-designed manual tools that organize your effort. But they are still your effort. HEY makes the manual loop calmer and more deliberate; it does not remove any of it.

AI Emaily crosses that line safely, which is the whole point. It is built around three authority modes you choose per account, per sender, or per rule. Manual is the familiar baseline: nothing happens without you, just like HEY. Copilot is the default for most people: AI Emaily triages your inbox, prepares replies in your voice, proposes meeting times, and queues follow-ups, then waits for your approval. In v1, human approval before any send is mandatory in Copilot, so the AI never speaks for you without a green light. Autopilot is the step HEY does not offer at all: within bounds you define, AI Emaily acts on its own, archiving newsletters, sending routine confirmations, nudging stalled threads, and closing loops while you do other work.

What makes Autopilot trustworthy rather than reckless is the guardrail design, and it is the part that turns autonomy into a real advantage. You set a confidence floor, so the AI only acts when it is sure enough; below that threshold it falls back to Copilot and asks. You set a domain allow-list, so autonomous sends only go to addresses you have approved. Every outbound message carries a send-delay undo, giving you a window to catch and cancel anything that looks wrong. And every action the agent takes, in any mode, is written to an audit log you can review and reverse. HEY has none of this, because HEY has no agent to govern.

There is also a security dimension to autonomy that HEY's manual model never has to solve. Because AI Emaily can act, it treats the content of incoming email as untrusted input and defends against prompt injection, where a malicious message tries to hijack the agent with hidden instructions. Actions run against an allowlist rather than letting arbitrary email text dictate behavior. This is the kind of engineering that only matters once you let the AI do more than present a message you read yourself, and it is the kind of engineering that makes AI Emaily safe to lean on.

The plain summary: HEY makes the manual loop calmer; AI Emaily shortens or removes the loop. A calmer manual loop has a hard ceiling, because you still touch every message. Removing the work does not, because the assistant absorbs the volume. If the goal is to spend less time in email rather than just a quieter time in email, an agent that can be trusted to act, with undo and audit as the safety net, is the better instrument, and AI Emaily is the only one of the two that offers it.

Provider support and lock-in: do you keep your own address?

Provider support is the most clear-cut practical difference, it is easy to verify, and it lands decisively in AI Emaily's favor. The central fact about HEY is that it is a closed ecosystem. To use HEY, you adopt a new @hey.com email address (or, on HEY for Work, a custom domain that HEY hosts), and you work inside the HEY app. HEY does not offer IMAP, which means it cannot fetch or check the mail on your existing Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, or any other account. There is no way to point HEY at the mailbox you already use and have it manage that mailbox in place.

This is the question that decides most buyers, so we will answer it directly. Can you keep your own email address with HEY? Not really. HEY supports forwarding your old mail in and sending from external addresses over SMTP or OAuth, but its own warnings are explicit that you should not rely on forwarding for critical mail, and that forwarding from a closed account is not meant to be used in perpetuity. In practice, committing to HEY means committing to the @hey.com identity and the migration that comes with it. That is a significant, hard-to-reverse decision, and it is the kind of lock-in HEY is candid about.

AI Emaily takes the opposite approach, and it is the approach almost everyone actually wants. AI Emaily connects to your existing Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, Fastmail, Proton, and any standard IMAP account, and manages that mailbox where it already lives. You keep the address your bank, your clients, your family, and a decade of online accounts already know. There is no migration, no forwarding chain to babysit, no new identity to announce, and no risk that important mail slips through a forwarding gap. You connect an account and AI Emaily starts working on the mail that is already there.

The second half of this is the unified inbox, and again AI Emaily wins outright. HEY gives you one mailbox: the HEY one. AI Emaily puts every connected account into one inbox and one search, so your Gmail, your Outlook work mail, and your iCloud personal mail show up together, sorted by what matters rather than by which login they came from. For anyone running more than one address, that consolidation is a daily time saver HEY cannot match, because HEY's entire model is the single closed account.

Provider breadth also makes the AI better, which compounds the advantage. Because AI Emaily sees across all your accounts, its triage, AI Screener, search, and follow-up tracking work over your whole email life rather than one silo. Ask it where a thread went and it can look everywhere. On reach, on lock-in, and on the unified inbox, AI Emaily is the clear recommendation.

The Screener: HEY does it by hand, AI Emaily automates it

The Screener is HEY's signature idea, and it is a good one, so we want to be fair about it. When someone emails your HEY address for the first time, the message does not go to your Imbox. It lands in the Screener, where you see the sender and decide, with a single yes or no, whether you ever want to hear from them. Say yes and their mail flows into your Imbox from then on; say no and it is filtered out for good. It is a clean, satisfying way to take back control of who reaches you, and it is one of the strongest arguments for HEY.

But notice what the Screener actually is: a manual decision queue. Every first-time sender becomes a small task that you, personally, must adjudicate. For a low-volume personal address that is pleasant. For a working professional who gets dozens of new senders a week, the Screener becomes its own inbox of pending decisions, and the calm it promises is partly just work relocated. HEY made the gate, but you are still the gatekeeper, every single time.

AI Emaily takes the same idea and finishes the job with its AI Screener. New senders are gated the same way, but the AI does the triage for you: it recognizes the obvious yes (a client replying, a vendor you do business with, a person in your contacts) and the obvious no (cold outreach, low-reputation senders, lists you never opted into), and it sorts them automatically based on your history and your rules. What is genuinely ambiguous is surfaced for a quick decision, but the routine never reaches you. The AI Screener also feeds AI Emaily's spam protection, so unwanted mail is blocked rather than merely sorted into a pile you still scroll past.

The difference is leverage. HEY's Screener turns first-contact into a manual checkpoint and trusts you to keep up with it. AI Emaily's AI Screener turns first-contact into an automated decision that learns from you and acts, escalating only the genuine edge cases. You get the same protection from strangers that draws people to HEY, without the standing pile of decisions, and across every account you connect rather than one closed mailbox. If the Screener is the reason you are looking at HEY, AI Emaily gives you the better version of it.

• HEY Screener: every first-time sender is a manual yes/no, every time, in one closed mailbox.
• AI Emaily AI Screener: routine yes/no is automated from your history and rules; only true edge cases reach you; works across all connected accounts.
• AI Emaily also acts on the result, feeding spam protection and triage, where HEY only sorts after you decide.

Pricing compared: HEY for You, HEY for Work, and AI Emaily

Cost is where the two products diverge for everyday buyers, and the structure favors AI Emaily. As of June 2026, HEY has no free tier and has never had one. HEY for You, the personal plan, is $99 per year, billed annually only, which works out to about $8.25 a month for a single @hey.com address with 100GB of storage, the HEY Calendar, the built-in workflows, spy-pixel blocking, and the apps. Premium short addresses cost more (three-character addresses run $349 a year and two-character addresses $999 a year). HEY for Families is $179 a year for up to four members. HEY for Work, the custom-domain plan for businesses, is about $12 per user per month. There is a 14-day trial, then you pay.

AI Emaily starts at $0. The Free plan covers up to two accounts with capped AI usage, no credit card and no sales call required. Pro is $17.99 per month billed annually ($19.99 monthly). Autopilot, the tier that unlocks fully autonomous action, is $29.99 per month billed annually ($34.99 monthly). Teams are $24.99 per seat per month, or $22.99 per seat billed annually, and teams of five or more seats save another 10% ($22.49 monthly, $20.69 annual per seat); every Team seat includes the full Autopilot feature set, autonomous send, follow-ups, and the on-device and BYOK options. The annual discount runs around 10 to 14% depending on plan. Paid plans also support BYOK: bring your own Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google key and your AI usage is uncapped, which has no HEY counterpart because HEY has no AI to meter.

The headline numbers look close at the entry level, $99 a year for HEY versus $215.88 a year for AI Emaily Pro at the annual rate, but the comparison is not like for like, and AI Emaily wins on value at every tier. For HEY's price you get a calm manual mailbox tied to a new address. For AI Emaily's price you get an AI assistant that triages, drafts in your voice, screens senders automatically, searches across all your accounts, and acts on your behalf, all while keeping the address you already have. And crucially, AI Emaily has a genuinely free tier, so you can test the entire premise without spending anything, where HEY asks for $99 up front after a two-week trial.

At the work level the contrast is just as clear. HEY for Work at roughly $12 per user per month buys shared workflows on a custom domain, but still no AI and still inside the closed HEY ecosystem. AI Emaily Team at $22.99 per seat (annual), dropping to $20.69 at five or more seats, includes full Autopilot per seat, human-or-agent delegation, and connection to whatever providers your team already uses. You are not paying more for a calmer mailbox; you are paying for an assistant per seat that does work. For the money, AI Emaily is the better buy.

Privacy and trust compared

Privacy is the dimension where HEY is strongest, so we want to be careful and fair here, and then explain why AI Emaily still comes out ahead. HEY's privacy stance is a core part of its identity: there are no ads, your email is not mined to target you, and HEY blocks spy pixels, the invisible tracking images marketers embed to know when and where you opened a message. For people who came to email distrustful of the big providers' data practices, this is a real and meaningful difference, and HEY deserves credit for it.

AI Emaily matches the part of that stance that matters and adds the protections an AI product specifically needs. AI Emaily does not train on your mail, ever. It operates on a zero-retention basis with its model providers, meaning prompts and content are not retained by the model to train on. It blocks tracking pixels and sandboxes links, the same hygiene HEY provides. And because it is AI-native, it goes further: an on-device option keeps sensitive processing local, and bring-your-own-key support lets you route AI through your own provider account. When you do use BYOK, your key is envelope-encrypted and decrypted only inside an isolated worker, never exposed client-side and never logged.

The deeper point is that AI Emaily had to solve a privacy and safety problem HEY never faces, and solved it. Because the AI can read and act on your mail, AI Emaily treats incoming email as untrusted input and defends against prompt injection, isolates the crown-jewel secrets like OAuth tokens behind encryption, and audits every privileged action. HEY's privacy model is essentially 'we don't look and we block trackers,' which is good. AI Emaily's privacy model is 'we don't train on your mail, we encrypt the sensitive parts, we keep an option to run on-device, and we make the AI itself safe to act,' which is the model you need once email becomes something an assistant operates on. Both are trustworthy; AI Emaily is the one built for the way email is going.

Platforms and apps

On platform coverage, HEY currently ships more native apps, and we will say so directly. HEY is available on the web and as apps for macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android, all working against the closed HEY backend. If you want a dedicated desktop and mobile app on day one across many operating systems, HEY has the wider spread of clients today.

AI Emaily's web client is live now and is a full, capable application, not a stripped-down preview, with native macOS, iOS, and Android apps shipping on the same API. Because everything is built web-first on one API, the experience is consistent across surfaces, and the AI features arrive everywhere at once rather than being held back on secondary platforms. For most people the web app already covers daily use today, and the native apps extend it.

Weigh this honestly: HEY's broader native app spread is a real but narrow advantage, and it does not change the larger picture. A native Linux client does not help if the underlying product still cannot check your existing accounts and still cannot act on your behalf. AI Emaily's web app on every platform plus shipping native apps already covers the way most people work, and it delivers the capabilities, the AI agent, the unified inbox, your own addresses, that decide the comparison. Platforms are the one row where HEY can claim more boxes; everywhere that matters, AI Emaily is ahead.

Context, voice, and the Living Brief

Beyond the headline agent, the everyday quality of AI Emaily's help comes from features HEY has no equivalent for, and they are worth understanding because they are what make the AI trustworthy in daily use. The Context and Variables Engine grounds the assistant in who you are and how you work: your name, role, company, the projects you are running, the people you deal with, and the facts a good draft needs. Instead of generic AI prose, replies come out in your voice and with your details correct, because the assistant is writing from your context, not guessing.

Voice drafting lets you speak a reply or an instruction and have AI Emaily turn it into a polished, on-voice message, which is genuinely useful on mobile or when you are thinking out loud. Semantic search plus Ask AI lets you query your mail in natural language, 'what did the vendor quote for the renewal, and did we agree to it,' and get an answer drawn from across every connected account, not just keyword matches in one mailbox. Rules and the 'brain' let you teach the assistant standing preferences once and have them applied consistently. None of this exists in HEY, because HEY has no AI layer at all.

The Living Brief is the feature that best captures the difference in ambition. AI Emaily can deliver a running brief of what matters, what changed, what needs you, and what it handled, into Slack or Telegram, so you stay on top of your inbox without sitting in it. That is the chief-of-staff idea made concrete: the assistant reports to you. HEY, by contrast, asks you to come to the mailbox and do the reading and the deciding yourself. Calendar is built into AI Emaily as well, so scheduling proposals and confirmations flow through the same assistant. Across context, voice, search, briefing, and scheduling, AI Emaily offers an entire layer of capability that HEY simply does not have.

• Context and Variables Engine: drafts in your voice with your facts correct, not generic AI text.
• Voice drafting: speak a reply or instruction, get an on-voice message back.
• Semantic search + Ask AI: natural-language answers across every connected account.
• Living Brief to Slack or Telegram: the assistant reports what matters and what it handled.
• Built-in calendar, rules, and a learnable 'brain' for standing preferences.
• HEY has none of these; it is a manual mailbox with no AI layer.

What HEY does well

It would be unfair, and unconvincing, to pretend HEY has no merits, so here is the honest credit it has earned. HEY is calm. Its whole design fights inbox anxiety: the Screener keeps strangers out until you say otherwise, the Imbox is reserved for mail you care about, the Feed turns newsletters into something you scroll when you choose to rather than something that buries your real mail, and the Paper Trail quietly files receipts and confirmations out of the way. The result is a mailbox with a clear philosophy, and that philosophy is genuinely soothing for people who feel besieged by email.

HEY is also principled. No ads, no data mining, spy pixels blocked by default, and a company in 37signals with a long, opinionated track record of building durable software. The 100GB of storage is generous, the built-in calendar is thoughtful, and the workflows (Reply Later, Set Aside, Bubble Up) are well-considered manual tools that many users genuinely love. If your problem is that email feels chaotic and invasive and you want a fresh, quiet, ad-free environment with a strong opinion about how mail should work, HEY delivers exactly that, and the Screener concept in particular is good enough that we built an automated version of it.

Here is the pivot, and it is the heart of this comparison. Every one of HEY's strengths is about making the manual experience of email calmer and cleaner. None of them reduces the amount of email work you personally do, and all of them are tied to abandoning your existing address. AI Emaily keeps the genuinely good idea, screening strangers and a calm, prioritized inbox, and pairs it with an AI agent that does the work, on the address you already have. You do not have to choose between calm and capable, or between principled and powerful. AI Emaily is both, which is why the recommendation does not change: AI Emaily.

Where AI Emaily wins

Pulling the threads together, the case for AI Emaily over HEY is decisive, and it rests on capabilities HEY does not have rather than on opinion. AI Emaily is the only one of the two with a real AI agent: it triages, drafts in your voice, screens senders automatically, schedules, follows up, and acts on your behalf through Manual, Copilot, and Autopilot, with a send-delay undo and a full audit log behind every action. HEY has no AI at all, by design, so on the dimension that matters most in 2026 there is no contest.

AI Emaily also wins on the thing most buyers actually care about: keeping your own email address. It connects to Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, Fastmail, Proton, and any IMAP account and manages the mailbox you already use, unifying everything into one inbox and one search. HEY requires a new @hey.com identity, offers no IMAP, and cannot touch your existing accounts. For anyone who is not prepared to abandon their address, that single fact ends the comparison.

And AI Emaily wins on price-for-value and access. It starts genuinely free, where HEY charges $99 a year after a two-week trial with no free tier. Its automated AI Screener delivers HEY's best idea without the standing pile of manual decisions. Its privacy posture matches HEY's no-tracking stance and adds zero-retention AI, an on-device option, and BYOK. The only row where HEY can claim more is the count of native apps, and a wider app spread does not compensate for having no agent, no provider support, and a forced address change. More capability, your own addresses, lower barrier to entry. For the overwhelming majority of people deciding between the two, AI Emaily is the right answer.

• Real AI agent (Manual, Copilot, Autopilot) with undo and audit, versus no AI in HEY.
• Keep your own Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, Fastmail, Proton, or IMAP address, versus a forced @hey.com move.
• Unified inbox and AI search across all accounts, versus one closed HEY mailbox.
• Automated AI Screener and spam protection, versus a manual yes/no on every first-time sender.
• Starts free, versus $99/year with no free tier.
• Zero-retention AI, on-device option, and BYOK, versus a no-AI privacy model.

How to switch from HEY to AI Emaily

Moving from HEY to AI Emaily is straightforward, and the most important part is what you do not have to do: you do not have to give up the addresses you actually use. Because AI Emaily connects to your existing accounts, the move is about pointing AI Emaily at your real mailboxes, not migrating into yet another closed system. Here is the path.

• You keep your existing addresses, so there is no risky cutover and no new identity to announce.
• The Free plan lets you confirm the fit before paying anything.
• If you want to keep HEY running in parallel during the transition, you can.

1. 1

   Sign up free at app.aiemaily.com/signup

   Create your AI Emaily account on the Free plan. No credit card, no sales call. You can connect up to two accounts on Free to try the full premise before paying.

2. 2

   Connect the addresses you already use

   Add your Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, Fastmail, Proton, or IMAP account. AI Emaily manages that mailbox in place, so you keep the address your contacts already know. Connect more than one to get a unified inbox.

3. 3

   Keep your @hey.com address if you want it

   If you have a HEY mailbox you are not ready to retire, you can keep it and have HEY forward into one of your connected accounts, or simply keep checking it on the side while AI Emaily runs your primary mail. Nothing forces an abrupt cutover.

4. 4

   Turn on the AI Screener and set your rules

   Enable the AI Screener so new senders are gated and triaged automatically, the automated version of HEY's Screener. Teach AI Emaily your standing preferences once via rules and the brain.

5. 5

   Start in Copilot, then graduate to Autopilot

   Run in Copilot first so you approve everything the AI prepares. As you build trust, set a confidence floor and a domain allow-list and let Autopilot handle the routine. Undo and the audit log are there the whole time.

6. 6

   Add the Living Brief and your team

   Route a Living Brief to Slack or Telegram so you stay on top of your inbox without living in it. If you are a team, invite seats on the Team plan for full Autopilot per seat and delegation.