Building your own Hey email Feed in Gmail

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Style Pass

2021-08-01 17:00:04

If there’s one epic idea Hey.com has, it’s the Newsletter Feed. Like a social feed, you can scroll through these newsletters, read what’s interesting, skip what’s not. It feels natural. It feels unlike regular email.

However, it gets annoying quickly. Some newsletters are very long, the UI is janky, some feed items are randomly skipped, and it’s a pain scrolling through the long emails I’ve lost interest in.

The second epic-in-principle idea is screening people in so random emails don’t reach me. Some companies are pesky and don’t respect unsubscribe buttons. This can get annoying quickly: I have to go the extra step of approving people who I know will email me, or for OTPs coming to my mail.

While I appreciate Hey’s way of thinking about email, their too constrained approach doesn’t suit me. So, I replicated their principles in Gmail, in a way that really works for me.

It took me less than 5 minutes to set up (and more than a few hours to figure out). But, I’ve been using this system for the past 6 months, and recently cancelled my Hey subscription: this approach works so much better for me, and builds into tools I already use.