Recycling Centre — HEY.com
A thoughtful look at HEY.com’s Recycling Centre, how it quietly reduces inbox clutter, and why intentional email cleanup matters.
The people over at HEY.com have done it again. Another small feature, thoughtfully designed, that quietly improves how email behaves in everyday use.
This time, it’s called the Recycling Centre.
It automatically clears old messages from The Feed after a time period you choose.
It’s a simple idea, but it tackles a familiar inbox problem: email that quietly piles up long after it’s stopped being useful.
A quick refresher on how HEY organises email
If you’re not familiar with how HEY works, it takes a deliberately different approach to inbox organisation.
Instead of one ever-growing inbox, HEY splits email into three main areas:
- Imbox — messages that need attention
- Feed — newsletters and updates you read
- Paper Trail — receipts and transactional email
User-defined rules decide where incoming email ends up. It’s a system that makes sense — but like any inbox, it can still get bloated over time.
The quiet problem: clutter you never revisit
The Feed, in particular, tends to grow endlessly. Newsletters you once cared about. Marketing emails that were useful at the time. Updates you’ll never search for again.
Do you really need an e-shot from six months ago?
That’s the question the Recycling Centre answers.
What the Recycling Centre actually does
The Recycling Centre allows you to automatically delete messages in The Feed after a set period:
- 30 days
- 60 days
- 90 days
If that sounds stressful, HEY also lets you:
- Turn recycling off entirely
- Create recycling rules by sender email address
- Create recycling rules by sender domain
- Enable or disable recycling per thread
So nothing happens without your consent.
This isn’t about forcing deletion
HEY is careful not to moralise email habits. If you want to keep everything forever, you still can.
But for those of us who don’t need infinite archives of low-value email, the Recycling Centre introduces something inboxes rarely offer: a gentle, automated clean-up that respects intent.
There’s a bigger idea behind it
HEY frames this feature in environmental terms — and they’re not wrong.
Keeping every email forever means:
- More storage
- More servers
- More power
- More pollution
Reducing unnecessary storage isn’t just good for inbox clarity; it’s a practical acknowledgement that digital hoarding has real-world costs.
Why this feature works
What makes the Recycling Centre effective isn’t complexity — it’s restraint.
It doesn’t try to be smart. It doesn’t guess. It doesn’t override you. It just quietly removes things you’ve already decided you don’t need long-term.
That’s very on-brand for HEY.
Final thoughts
The Recycling Centre won’t revolutionise email on its own. But it does something arguably more important: it nudges inboxes toward intentional decay instead of endless accumulation.
For anyone who likes their inbox to stay readable, searchable, and calm, it’s a genuinely useful addition — and another example of HEY improving email by focusing on behaviour, not features.
