I'm using Hey, and while there are some issues with the company (namely, the CEO enacting some shitty employee policies during the pandemic), their email service is great.
Particularly, I love their email allowlist. Whenever you get an email from a new sender for the first time, you have the option to allow or deny their emails from then on. I used to always have thousands of unread emails when I was on Gmail (most things just routing to an unused "Newsletter" folder), but now, pretty much every email I get is one that I actually want to read.
It's a paid service, and tbh debatable whether or not it's worth the price, but the screening feature singlehandedly makes it worthwhile for me.
I wondered if folks were still using Hey. I use the iOS app Spark for managing my email, it has a similar "allow list" for new senders. Agreed it's super helpful.
To be fair though, I'm also pretty reluctant to change emails. I switched everything over, and while it sounds like you can emulate the allowlist with other services, I reeeally don't want to switch yet again :/
I switched from Hey to Onmail because it's basically Hey without the douchey CEO. Also I was an early onmail adopter so I have my first name for an email.
It has a free tier but I pay for it. I switched away from gmail because I wanted my email to be a service I'm the customer of that I pay for, rather than me being the product.