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Slightly off topic. What is their need for an email app, which just works with their new domain? Is this remarkably better than the iOS Mail app?

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It is augmented email - there are a lot of features they wrote that break the standard protocol so you would lose a ton of benefit without the app.

https://hey.com/features/

Likewise because of that you don't get IMAP credentials so you couldn't even use a different email app to add your hey.com email address to it.

It's not an email app (only). It's an email service (to replace e.g. Gmail).

Except this email service offers no IMAP, POP3, or other standards support so you can’t read or send Hey.com email without doing so through their client app.

that's the whole point of Hey, they want to fundamentally alter how email works. adding all those would be just limiting what the point of it is.

It's a clever UX, with interesting features in the business logic. But at the data layer none of it prohibits IMAP integration; simply presenting IMAP folder emulation for the emails and attachments would suffice for export or off-platform access. The fact that they aren't willing to do so is suspicious.

You could always simply...not use the service, and since email is distributed, literally nothing bad happens if you choose not to.

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