Can HEY be vibe coded?

Build brief — a focused alternative to HEY

**Verdict:** Not faithfully · **Buildability:** 26/100 · **Category:** Email

**Source:** https://www.canitbevibecoded.com/hey-email

Independent editorial assessment from Can It Be Vibe Coded? Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or derived from HEY. Verify current pricing and capabilities before acting.

Context

**HEY** — Opinionated paid email service with screening, bundles, and privacy defaults. It currently costs $8.25/mo.

You can build an email client, but replacing HEY means running a trustworthy email service: deliverability, spam filtering, abuse handling, storage, mobile apps, and reputation.

This brief describes a focused, single-operator replacement for the part of HEY that is genuinely reproducible. It is deliberately narrower than the product it replaces, and it says so in writing. Build the useful core; do not pretend to have rebuilt the rest.

What you are building

Build a personal mail client on top of IMAP/SMTP or a hosted mailbox; do not try to replace the global email service layer casually.

Build a focused single-user workflow with real persistence, search, and export.

A responsive interface with real empty, loading, success, and error states.

Requirements

Functional

Existing email provider or mailbox.

Spam filtering if hosting.

Domain/DNS if custom email.

Data and integrations

IMAP/SMTP APIs.

Each of these needs a real account, credential, or quota. Set them up before writing feature code.

Non-functional

Accessibility: semantic markup, labelled controls, visible focus, and reduced-motion support.

Security: server-side secrets, validated input, and no credentials in the client bundle.

Reliability: retries with backoff on external calls, and a clear failure state when a provider is down.

Portability: the operator can export their data and leave without losing it.

Implementation brief

Build me an email client with HEY's screening and bundling ideas, running on

top of a mailbox I already pay for (Fastmail, Gmail, anything with IMAP).

Requirements:

A local web app: Node + Express + better-sqlite3, binds to localhost;

imapflow for reading, nodemailer for sending, creds in .env.

The screener: mail from first-time senders lands in a screening view where I

approve or block; decisions persist in SQLite and apply to all future mail.

Bundles: approved senders get a category; newsletters render in a batched

feed view, receipts in a paper-trail list; only approved humans hit the

inbox.

Reply-later: mark a thread and it sits in a persistent to-answer stack until

cleared.

Write decisions back as IMAP folders and labels so my phone's mail app

roughly mirrors the sorting.

Strip remote images in the reading pane by default.

No accounts of its own, no telemetry; mail stays at my provider.

Out of scope: running an SMTP server, custom domains, and mobile apps. Do not

replace the mail service itself; deliverability and spam reputation are the

product and cannot be rebuilt solo.

README: per-provider app-password setup, and a warning that Gmail OAuth is a

project of its own, use an app password or Fastmail to keep the scope small.

Delivery standard

Inspect the repository first, then write a short implementation plan before writing code.

Deliver the smallest complete end-to-end workflow first; every primary control must work against persisted data.

Use real validation and storage; never substitute fake dashboards, decorative controls, hard-coded success states, or mock integrations.

Include responsive layouts plus genuine empty, loading, success, validation, and failure states.

Keep secrets server-side in environment variables, provide .env.example, and never commit credentials or user data.

Add structured logs around every external call and return actionable errors without leaking sensitive details.

Write unit tests for the core logic and one automated test of the main user journey.

Finish with a README covering setup, architecture, data location, backups, tests, deployment, and known limitations.

Acceptance criteria

A clean install starts the app using only the README and .env.example.

The primary journey works from first visit through saved result, reload, edit, export, and deletion where applicable.

Invalid input, missing configuration, provider failure, and an empty database each have a usable state.

The interface works at 390px and 1440px, is keyboard navigable, and shows visible focus on every control.

Tests, type checking, linting, and a production build all pass with no ignored failures.

No part of the interface implies a live integration, security guarantee, or scale capability that was not actually built and verified.

Non-goals

Do not build these, and do not claim to have replaced them:

Email deliverability.

Spam/abuse systems.

Storage reliability.

Mobile apps.

Reliability at the vendor's scale is an operations problem, not a prompt.

Trust, audits, and counterparties matter more than feature parity.

What you still own after launch

Secure credentials, rotate secrets, and handle provider rate limits.

Run migrations, backups, restores, and dependency updates.

Test the critical journey after every model, API, or hosting change.

Monitor failures and fix the edge cases a first prompt will miss.

Risk

**Operational risk.** The code is achievable; dependable data, integrations, and ongoing operations are the real cost.

Editorial confidence in this assessment: high. No independent one-shot implementation is linked yet.

Prior art

Working open-source software you can read, fork, or borrow from before starting:

[Mail-in-a-Box](https://github.com/mail-in-a-box/mailinabox) — Open-source personal mail server stack; useful prior art but deliverability remains the mo

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