Why Is Mail Missing in HEY? The Screener Explained

Applies to: HEY (@hey.com and HEY for Domains)

MSWritten by Maria Santos, Email Systems Writer · Last reviewed Aug 2026

Quick answer: The Screener asks you to approve or reject any sender the first time they email you. Reject one, and every future email from that sender gets silently dropped — permanently, with no notification, unless you go back and manually change the decision.

This is genuinely the single biggest source of "why isn't my email arriving" confusion on HEY, and it's worth understanding clearly because the consequence of getting it wrong isn't small — it's permanent until you fix it yourself.

1. What the Screener actually does

The first time anyone emails your HEY address, you're shown a simple choice: let this person into your Imbox going forward, or screen them out. It's a one-time decision per sender, not per message — approve someone once, and everything from them arrives normally after that. Reject someone once, and every message from them, forever, gets dropped without ever reaching your account. No bounce message gets sent to them, and no notification appears for you — it just quietly stops arriving.

2. Why this causes real problems

It's genuinely easy to screen out a sender by mistake — an unfamiliar name, an address you don't recognize immediately, a legitimate business you forgot you'd interacted with. Because there's no follow-up warning and no bounce sent to the sender either, both sides can be left assuming the email should have arrived, with neither one realizing why it didn't.

3. How to check if a sender was screened

Go to the Screener section in HEY (accessible from the main navigation).
Look through the list of senders you've previously screened out.
If the missing sender is there, that's your answer — the decision was made at some point, correctly or by mistake.

4. How to reverse it

Find the sender in your screened-out list.
Change the decision to approve them.
Going forward, new mail from that sender will reach your Imbox normally — but messages sent while they were screened out are gone and won't retroactively appear.

5. Avoiding this going forward

When the Screener prompt shows up for someone you're not immediately sure about, it's worth pausing rather than screening on instinct — check the actual email address, not just the display name, before deciding. If in doubt and it costs you nothing to wait, letting them through and dealing with unwanted mail later is safer than rejecting someone whose email you might actually need.

Because rejected mail never bounces back to the sender, they'll have no idea their message didn't arrive. If you're expecting something important from someone new, it's worth proactively checking the Screener rather than waiting to notice it's missing.