“Deleting” contacts in HEY email
Today I decided to give HEY one more go as my full-time email and calendar applications for one week. My subscription is up in the middle of March so I need to make a decision soon. I decided I needed to clean everything out of the account and start fresh.
Ask anyone who uses HEY if they like how it handles contacts and likely all of them wouldn’t be too happy. There is no official way to delete contacts, only hide them, and every single email that comes in, whether screened out or not, creates a new contact. You can hide them, which removes them from search, but if you’re like me the idea of a bunch of garbage sitting out there drives you nuts.
I used quotes around the word deleting in the title because I discovered a work-around for removing contacts that has one big assumption — there aren’t any emails in HEY that use that contact.
The trick is this:
- Create a dummy contact to use for this process.
- For the contact you want to delete copy it’s email address to the dummy contact created in step 1.
- Save the dummy and it will ask if you want to merge contacts. Choose to merge.
- Repeat steps 2 and 3 with other contacts. I did this in bunches to avoid any potential problems or rework.
- After merging delete the email address from the dummy contact and save again.
That is it. The contact will be gone — usually. I say usually because while I was able to remove most of my “contacts” this way there were few that still hung around after this process. I couldn’t understand why as I had removed all emails, emptied the trash, removed any tags, etc. but 5-6 left out of almost 100 was a good compromise.
The other compromise of course is that the dummy contact will still be sitting out there but it can be used in the future or removed using the same trick with a contact you know you’ll be keeping around.