A HEY email Mac app: the screener in a window of its own

Most searches for a HEY email Mac app are answered in one sentence: it exists, and it is a direct download from hey.com rather than something in the Mac App Store. That sentence is also where the useful part starts, because the official app answers one question and leaves three others open. Two HEY accounts in two windows. The calendar beside the mail instead of inside it. And a Mac whose default mail behaviour was designed around applications that speak IMAP, which HEY deliberately does not.

What follows is what the official app covers, where it stops, and what to do about the parts it was never meant to solve.

What 37signals actually ships

The apps page divides HEY into three groups. Full featured native apps for iOS and Android, listed separately for HEY Email and HEY Calendar. A desktop group covering Mac, Windows and Linux. And the browser, described as working anywhere there is a browser and an internet connection.

On the Mac, the desktop group is two disk images: an Apple Silicon build and an Intel build, both served straight from hey.com. Neither is in the Mac App Store, and a store search for a HEY client from 37signals returns nothing, so there is no store update mechanism behind it. On Windows the same app comes from the Microsoft Store and on Linux from Snap, and both of those listings are registered under the name hey-mail, which is a useful clue about the scope of the desktop build.

That clue holds up. HEY Calendar has its own downloads on iOS and Android, and no desktop equivalent is offered on the apps page. There is no calendar snap and no separate calendar disk image. On a Mac, the calendar is reached through the browser or through whatever window is already showing HEY.

The other thing worth knowing is that this is not a matter of preference. The help centre states that using HEY requires one of its own Web, Mac, Windows, iOS or Android apps, and that off the shelf third party email applications will not work, because HEY does not support IMAP or POP. Mail on the Mac, or any Gmail specific native client, is not an alternative route to a HEY account. There are two ways in, and both of them are HEY's own.

What the plans cost, since the app does not change them

The apps are included at every price, so the table below is about what the account gets rather than which window it appears in.

	HEY for You	HEY for Domains
Price	$99 per year	$12 per user, per month
Billing	Annual only, $8.25 per month equivalent	Monthly only
Address	An @hey.com address of your choosing	Your own domain
Free trial	30 days, no credit card	No trial of Domains itself
Storage	100GB	Everything in HEY for You, minus a @hey.com address and the personal blog

Two footnotes on that table, both from HEY's own pricing page. Short addresses are priced separately: two character addresses are $999 per year and three character addresses $349 per year, with everything from four characters up at the standard $99. And the first user on HEY for Domains is $10 per month rather than $12, with additional users at $12. A family arrangement exists at $179 per year for up to four additional people, each with their own address, calendar and account.

The reason this belongs in an article about a Mac app is the shape it creates. A large share of HEY users end up holding two accounts, a personal @hey.com address and a work address on a domain, because that is how the product is priced and sold. Two accounts is exactly the case the single official app handles least well.

Linked accounts, and where one window runs out

HEY has a real answer for multiple accounts, and it is worth using before reaching for anything else. Linking is done from Accounts and Settings with a button reading Link another account, after which the Imbox shows mail from both accounts at once. There is no limit on how many HEY accounts can be linked. Where accounts are of different types, HEY marks personal mail with one shape and work mail with another so they can be told apart at a glance, and the avatar menu can narrow the view to a single account.

That covers the case where the goal is to see everything together. It does not cover the case where the goal is to keep things apart.

A single application window has one current state. When the work account and the personal account share it, deciding to focus on work means changing what that window is showing, which is a choice that has to be made again every time attention moves. Nothing keeps a personal Feed out of view during working hours, because there is one window and it is wherever it was left. The same is true of the calendar: on a Mac it shares the window with the mail, so putting a day's schedule next to an Imbox means alternating rather than arranging.

An app per account and per surface changes that arithmetic. A work app that only ever shows work mail. A personal app that only ever shows personal mail. A calendar app that opens on the calendar. Each one has its own icon, its own name in Command and Tab and its own signed in session, so nothing switches and nothing has to be remembered. For anyone running HEY for Domains alongside a personal address, that is the difference between one window with a mode and three windows with jobs.

The Screener deserves its own window

The Screener is the feature that most rewards a separate window, and the reason is what it is for. First time senders are held there until a decision is made about whether they can ever email again, which is a deliberate, occasional task rather than something to do while reading mail. Screener History keeps the list of everyone screened out, someone screened back in has their last 90 days of mail delivered, and contacts added manually bypass the Screener entirely.

Treating that as its own app has a practical effect. Screening becomes a thing done at a set time, in a window that opens on the list rather than on the Imbox, and the rest of the day is not interrupted by a decision that can wait. It also stops the Imbox being the place where triage and screening compete for the same attention, which is the habit the Screener was designed to break in the first place.

The same logic applies to anything in HEY used on a schedule rather than continuously. The Feed, which collects newsletters, is a reading session rather than a stream. Paper Trail is a filing cabinet visited when something needs finding. A window that opens on one of those, and contains nothing else, is a different tool from a general mail window that happens to have that view selected.

Building those windows on a Mac

macOS has two routes built in, and a third for the cases the first two do not cover.

In Safari, sign in at app.hey.com, use the share control and choose Add to Dock. Apple's Safari guide describes the result: a Dock and Spotlight icon, a simplified toolbar with no tab strip, and an app that posts its own notifications. The existing Safari session carries over, which is convenient for the first account and unhelpful for the second, since both end up sharing it.

In Chrome, the equivalent is under Cast, save and share as Install page as app, documented on Google's help page. Each installed app belongs to the Chrome profile that created it, so a second account means a second profile.

The third route is a tool that turns a website into a standalone Mac app, with its own session per app. That is the part that matters here: one app signed in as the work account, another as the personal account, a third opening on the calendar, none of them sharing cookies with the others or with the browser. The Features page covers which parts of the window can be turned on or off per app, and the Guide walks through making the first one.

	Official desktop app	Browser tab	One app per account
Where it comes from	Direct download from hey.com	Already installed	Made once, per account
Two accounts	Linked in one window	One session per browser profile	One window each
Calendar beside mail	Shares the window	Separate tab	Separate app
Opens on	Wherever it was left	Wherever it was left	Whatever view was chosen
Notifications and Focus	Per app	Whole browser	Per app

One compatibility note applies to every wrapper. HEY publishes the browser versions it supports: Safari 17.2 or later, Firefox 125 or later, Chrome 120 or later, Edge 120 or later, and Opera 106 or later. Anything wrapping an older engine is outside what HEY tests against.

What no window arrangement will fix

IMAP is the first and largest limit. HEY does not offer it, third party mail applications cannot connect, and mail in other accounts stays unread in those accounts until it is read there. Forwarding mail into HEY is supported and is the intended path for consolidating addresses. None of that changes because a window has its own icon.

Default mail handling on the Mac is the second. macOS chooses a default email reader from the applications that register themselves as mail handlers, so a wrapped web app will only appear in that list if it declares itself one. Anyone who needs every mailto link on the Mac to land in HEY should check that behaviour before relying on it.

Storage, pricing and features are account properties. 100GB is 100GB in any window, the annual billing on HEY for You is annual either way, and a feature absent from the account is absent from every app that signs into it.

What the windows change is arrangement, which is what HEY is about anyway. Work mail and personal mail stop taking turns in one frame. The calendar can sit beside the Imbox instead of replacing it. And the Screener becomes a task with a place, rather than a notification arriving in the middle of something else.

What to change first

Install the official desktop app for the account that carries the most mail, then make one separate window for the second account rather than linking everything into a single view. If per app sessions and a window that opens on the Screener are what is needed, that is the case for a tool such as Kagemusha, and the linked accounts feature is the right answer for anyone who genuinely wants one combined Imbox.