Shortwave is a spiritual successor to Google Inbox created by ex-Googlers
Inbox by Gmail, in my opinion, was the best way to manage emails and was years, if not decades, ahead of its time. However, we are all aware of how things turned out. Google decided to phase out the service in favor of the original Gmail client, promising to carry over some of the smarts but never fully delivering on that promise. Many other services have attempted to fill the void since then, but none have succeeded. Another is now taking a stab at the assignment, and it appears to be the most promising yet: shortwave.
Shortwave
Shortwave is a new email client designed by ex-Googlers, including CEO Andrew Lee and other well-known professionals. He’s the brains behind Firebase, the Google platform that changed app development, and now he and his team are attempting to do the same with emails, leaning largely on Google’s Inbox ideas.
Similar to Inbox, Shortwave aims to automatically organize your emails for you, making it easier to sort through the daily barrage of distractions and notifications. It accomplishes this by treating your inbox as a to-do list, with items that you can mark as completed whenever you no longer need to respond to them. Important emails can be pinned to the top of the client, and all items can be manually reordered using drag-and-drop in priority order rather than chronological order. When you don’t have time to deal with emails right now, you can snooze them entirely, like you can on Gmail.
Inbox and Shortwave both use the same “secret weapon.” Based on contacts and context, it automatically groups relevant emails into bundles. Calendar notifications, social network updates, and newsletters are all wrapped into their own bundles, taking up less space and allowing you to ignore them until you’re ready to respond. Any talks with a single contact are also looped into a single bundle, even if they span many threads. You can mark all emails in a bundle done or archived with a single button, just as you may mark all previous emails done at once.
Shortwave is even going a step farther than Inbox and attempting to make those nasty email threads easier to handle. When new people join the chat or leave it, you can clearly see, that the client can handle divergent talks that started in the same thread and remove contacts with ease.
The email-drafting procedure is also being improved by the service. It has all of the standard formatting options as well as markdown support, as well as simple access to emoji and GIFs.
Summing Up
Given that this is the first version, Shortwave’s client remains incredibly promising. Many thoughtful features are included, such as notification snoozing based on your working hours, intelligent support for handling Gmail filters that may prevent emails from arriving in your Shortwave inbox, tidy handling of email aliases, automatic signature import from Gmail, and delayed email delivery with an undo send option.
Shortwave cannot rely on Google’s seemingly limitless finances to fund itself because it is an independent firm. As a result, Shortwave is only free to use if you don’t need access to more than 90 days of your Gmail email history. For corporations, unlimited history and a variety of team functions are locked behind a $9/month per person subscription. Given all of these team management tools, it’s clear that Shortwave is primarily targeting business users, who will get far more value for their $9 per person investment than someone who simply wants their whole email history synced.
