Hey, let’s talk about email.

Email gets a bad rap, but it shouldn’t. Email’s a treasure.

It feels great to get an email from someone you care about. Or a newsletter you enjoy. Or an update from a service you love. That’s how email used to feel all the time.

But things changed.

You started getting stuff you didn’t want from people you didn’t know. You lost control over who could reach you. You were forced to inherit other people’s bad communication habits. An avalanche of automated emails amplified the clutter.

And Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, Apple, and all the others just let it happen.

Now email feels like a chore, rather than a joy. Something you fall behind on. Something you clear out, not cherish. Rather than delight in it, you deal with it. Your relationship with email changed, and you didn’t have a say.

And yet, email remains a wonder. Thanks to email, people across cultures, continents, countries, cities, and communities communicate every day. It’s reliable. It’s simple. It makes it easy for two humans to share their love, and for millions of people to earn a living.

There are no service provider incompatibilities, technical hurdles, or gatekeepers. If you have an email address, and they have an email address, email just works, every time.

So good news, the magic’s still there. It’s just obscured — buried under a mess of modern day bad habits and neglect. Some from people, some from machines, a lot from email systems.

It deserves a dust off. A renovation. Modernized for the way we email today.

With HEY, we’ve done just that. It’s a redo, a rethink, a simplified, potent reintroduction of email. A fresh start, the way it should be.

HEY is our love letter to email, and we’re sending it to you. Coming April 2020 to the web, iOS, and Android.

- Jason Fried

Try it.

We’ll be rolling out invites soon. To get on the list, email iwant@hey.com and tell us how you feel about email. Could be a love story, or a hate story — or both. Could be long, could be short. It’s your story, so it’s up to you.

P.S. We’ll only use your email address to send an invite to HEY, not for future marketing, sales, or anything like that. We’ll never sell or trade your name or email. In fact, the list will be destroyed once everyone on the list has been invited.

P.P.S. If your story is great, and we’d like to share it broadly, we’ll send you an email back asking your permission before publishing anything. Promise.