Recycling Center — HEY.com
HEY’s Recycling Centre is a small feature with a bigger idea: not everything in an email archive needs to be kept indefinitely. It lets Feed messages expire on your terms without forcing deletion.
Updated February 2026 with an expanded edit and clearer framing.
HEY introduced the Recycling Centre some time ago, but it remains one of the more thoughtful examples of inbox design I’ve seen. What makes it interesting isn’t the mechanics of deletion, but the underlying assumption: clutter is not primarily a storage problem, it’s a behavioural one.
In practice, it confronts something most email systems quietly tolerate — retention by default rather than by decision — where messages rarely feel overwhelming one by one, but gradually become burdensome simply because nothing is designed to leave.
A quick refresher on how HEY organises email
If you haven’t used HEY, the structure matters.
Rather than funnel everything into a single, ever-expanding inbox, HEY separates incoming mail into three distinct spaces: the Imbox for messages that require attention, the Feed for newsletters and updates, and the Paper Trail for receipts and transactional messages. You decide where new senders belong, and that initial decision shapes how your inbox behaves over time.
It’s a structured system that reduces noise at the front door. But structure alone doesn’t stop accumulation. Organisation does not automatically prevent digital hoarding.
The quiet problem: clutter you never revisit
The Feed is where the slow build happens.
Newsletters you once enjoyed. Promotional emails that were useful at the time. Updates that felt relevant in the moment but have long since expired. Even when you unsubscribe, the historical backlog remains. Even unsubscribing doesn’t undo what’s already accumulated — which is why unsubscribing isn’t always the full solution. You rarely search for those messages. You almost never need them again. Yet they continue to sit there, quietly expanding your archive.
The Recycling Centre interrupts that pattern. It asks a simple question most providers avoid asking: if you no longer derive value from something, why should it remain indefinitely?
What the Recycling Centre actually does
Within The Feed, you can choose to automatically remove messages after 30, 60, or 90 days. Recycling can be disabled entirely. It can be configured by sender address or domain. It can be overridden on a per-thread basis.
Nothing is forced, and nothing happens without your consent. What changes is the default assumption. Instead of infinite retention being the unspoken rule, HEY allows you to introduce a time horizon that matches the nature of the content.
Most newsletters are not meant to be permanent. They are timely by design. The Recycling Centre simply acknowledges that reality.
This isn’t about minimalism
It would be easy to frame this as a push toward inbox minimalism, but that misses the point. If you want to keep everything forever, HEY allows you to do so. The feature exists for people who recognise that not all email deserves permanence.
What makes it compelling is that it completes a logical chain. If you have already decided a sender belongs in the Feed — useful, readable, but not critical — then allowing those messages to quietly expire over time is consistent with that original judgement.
It respects the intent behind your categorisation.
The broader idea behind it
HEY sometimes presents this in environmental terms, and there is a valid argument there. Digital storage has consequences. Every retained message is replicated, backed up, powered, and cooled somewhere.
But the more interesting layer isn’t environmental at all — it’s about design assumptions.
Most modern email systems are built around retention. The longer messages remain in your archive, the more reasons you have to return to the interface, search, scroll, and engage with it. HEY, by contrast, seems comfortable with disappearance. It assumes that attention is finite and that some communication is inherently temporary.
That is not a technical tweak. It is a design position.
Why this feature still matters
The Recycling Centre works because it is restrained. It does not attempt to guess what you care about. It does not use opaque algorithms to decide what to keep. It simply acts on a rule you have already defined.
In a software landscape increasingly built around predictive automation, that restraint feels deliberate.
The feature won’t transform email on its own. What it does instead is introduce the idea of intentional decay — the recognition that not everything needs to be kept forever to remain useful.
This fits with my approach to email more broadly — treating the inbox as something you shape over time, not a place where everything piles up forever.
Features like this give a good sense of whether HEY’s approach to email will suit you, especially if you prefer clear boundaries rather to an archive that grows indefinitely.
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If you’re considering HEY more broadly, I’ve written a longer piece on whether it’s a brilliant reinvention or an overpriced experiment.
