I tried Hey, the $99 a year email app that Apple threatened to remove from the App Store, and it completely changed the way I look at my inbox forever

Rather than having one main inbox, Hey dissects it into a few different categories based on the type of mail you typically get. First, there's the Imbox — an inbox for your important stuff. This is where you can view new emails that you haven't previously seen as well as messages you've already read.

But messages don't just appear in your Imbox. You have to screen first-time senders, similar to the way you would screen a phone call. The idea is to make sure you're not getting slammed with emails that aren't relevant to you (although these emails aren't completely lost, you can still view them in a section called Screened Out).

In other words, this section is for emails that you'd like to read but don't need to respond to. The Feed also has a different interface that isn't just the pile of subject lines stacked on top of one another like you may be accustomed to. The Feed is designed to be just that — it's a feed showing previews of these emails that you can scroll through seamlessly without having to navigate back to your inbox.

I've also been using this section to keep track of any emails from my credit card providers and Venmo transaction alerts, for example.

When you receive an email, you can choose to always have emails from that sender appear in The Feed or Paper Trail, so you know where to find these notices moving forward rather than sifting through one overflowing inbox.

"Set Aside" could make it easier to find emails containing flight tracking numbers or other types of data you may need to access in a pinch. In the workplace, I could imagine that folder being helpful for keeping messages like office FAQs or meeting instructions handy.

There's also a separate folder just for attachments, meaning you won't have to sift through emails to find a specific photo or PDF someone may have sent you. You can also pin "Set Aside" emails to the bottom of your inbox to keep them top-of-mind.

These features alone aren't what make Hey particularly unique. Gmail offers tabs for sorting emails into categories, like newsletters and social media emails, as does Superhuman.

It's the idea that Basecamp is going beyond just allowing you to sort or label emails by category and is actually thinking about why you might be looking for a particular email. As such, its features are centered on surfacing and organizing information from your inbox in a way that makes sense depending on your use for it.

The ability to read all of your newsletters in a feed rather than by clicking on them individually is just one example of this mindset, but here are a few others:

• The ability to rename email threads for your own reference without changing the title for other recipients
• A tool for clipping text from emails so it can be quickly referenced without pulling up the entire email
• The ability to merge separate email threads about the same subject into one
• Sticky notes that can be tacked onto emails in your Imbox for your own personal reference

I've been having email from my personal Gmail account, which is usually full of marketing emails, newsletters, and transaction notifications, forwarded to Hey, and I've appreciated how it's helped me to recalibrate how I sift through email.

I usually set aside time near the end of the week or weekend to blow through the hundreds of emails I typically get in my Gmail account, many of which I either trash or mark as read. Screening emails as they come in and designating them to drop in different buckets alleviates that burden in a couple of ways: by reducing the amount of email that makes it to my Imbox, and by making it easier to address new messages more efficiently as they come in.

Screening first-time senders can feel a bit cumbersome after a while, especially if you get a lot of email on a daily basis. Hey's Imbox and folders don't show any unread counts, a deliberate decision meant to prevent you from feeling overwhelmed. I can appreciate this, but knowing how many emails I have left to look over in a day often makes me feel more organized, not less.

Hey also doesn't support signatures yet, although Basecamp says that feature will be coming soon. The company is working on a way to create signatures that are neater and more concise than the ones currently available through other email services.

Hey teaches you to re-think email, and that requires a little bit of time and effort.

You'll have to learn some new habits and be willing to stray away from the idea of email as you know it today — i.e., an inbox where new emails pile up in the form of a list of subject lines. Hey walks you through this brilliantly, but you still need to be open to changing your habits and expectations when it comes to email.

That's because the point of Hey isn't just to de-clutter your inbox; it's to give you the tools you need to make email actually work better for you.

That's the audience that Hey is tapping into: power users that want to get more out of their email and are willing to pay $99 per year to do so through the extra features and enhanced privacy.