Could one turn it into an infinite loop by sending an email with a reply-to at the same address?

hey.com claims to have "fixed" email - I tried to find out what exactly they do to justify the claim but hit my timeout at about 5 minutes wading through vague testimonials. there's a 37min video that supposedly breaks it all down, I bailed about 5min in, afaict it's a just polished client.

It’s not an email client- it’s a gateway to a proprietary messaging service that happens to support email

Which is exactly what Gmail is.

Except that you can use Gmail through any IMAP/POP client (https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7126229?hl=en) while that's not possible with Hey where you always have to use their apps.

Yes I do suppose that's true, but I don't think that makes it any less proprietary in nature. The same could be said of many mail providers such as Gmail, Outlook.com, etc. They have their own way of doing it that, externally, looks like mail. Internally it's something altogether different.

This is proven by sending an email from one Gmail account to another. It is all but instant. I swear once the email arrived before the Enter key had debounced! SMTP can't move things quite that fast.

I don’t think it matters how it’s implemented internally, just like the end user doesn’t have to care about which language the IRC/web/Jabber server is implemented in. As long as it speaks the correct protocol to the outside it doesn’t matter and that’s the beauty of standardized protocols.

Right which is kind of my point. They say they've reinvented email or whatever, but haven't they all? The difference is that this provider forces you to use their client.

The "reinvention" is primarily in the client (but also in the client service) and has to do with getting you to use email differently by having you emails behave in a non-traditional manner.

In case you're serious about not understanding it, the essence of hey is getting an effective email triage workflow out of the box so you only see what you're interested in and don't spend any more time managing your email (inbox zero, filter rules, etc.)

I've learned to distrust services with rare/valuable domain names by default.

oh! i thought it was merely trying to create buzz but I didn't think about building up an email list. pretty smart.

Not the case, we're not keeping any of the email addresses/data. We'll add a note.

Thanks for the fast and appropriate response!

I think they need Terms/Privacy Policy and your consent if they are collecting emails. There is none of that.