If you ask me, Inbox by Gmail was the single best way to handle emails and was years, if not decades, ahead of its time. But we all know how things panned out. Google decided to discontinue the service in favor of the original Gmail client, promising to bring over some of the smarts — only to never fully follow through on that. Many other services have since tried to pick up the slack, but none ended up coming close. Now another one is trying its shot at the task, and it would seem like it’s the most promising one yet: Shortwave.
Shortwave is a new email client created by ex-Googlers, a team consisting of renowned experts like CEO Andrew Lee. He’s the brain behind Firebase, the Google platform that revolutionized app development, and now, he and his team are setting out to do the same for emails — relying heavily on the ideas first introduced by Google with Inbox.
When you put Shortwave and Inbox side-by-side, you’ll immediately see just how related they are. Like Inbox, Shortwave sets out to automatically organize your emails for you and wants to make it easier to sort through the influx of distractions and notifications you receive every day. To do that, it’s treating your inbox like a todo list with items you can mark done once you don’t need to react to them anymore. You can pin important emails to the top of the client, and you can manually reorder all items via drag-and-drop according to priority rather than chronological order. You can also snooze emails altogether, like on Gmail, when you don’t have time to deal with them right now.
Shortwave utilizes the same “secret weapon” as Inbox. It automatically sorts related emails into bundles based on contacts and context. Calendar notifications, social media updates, and newsletters all get looped into their own respective bundles, making them take up less space and helping you ignore them until you’re ready to interact with them. Any conversations with a single contact, even when they stretch across multiple threads, are looped into a single bundle as well. All emails in a bundle can be marked done or archived via a single button, just like you can mark all older emails done all at once, too.
Shortwave is even thinking things a little further than Inbox, and is trying its best to make those dreaded email threads easier to navigate. You can easily tell when new people get added to the conversation or when they leave, and the client is capable of handling diverging conversations that started in the same thread.
The service is also looking to improve the process of drafting emails. It supports all the usual formatting options but adds markdown support as a cherry on top, complete with easy access to emoji and GIFs.
After a short hands-on session, I’m already in love with the service, but it’s obvious that there are still a few things missing. For one, it isn’t possible to outright delete emails (what am I supposed to keep old calendar or shipping notifications for?), and for another, you can’t preview attachments right in the client — downloading is the only option. You also need to keep in mind that none of your actions are synced back to your regular Gmail app other than sending and receiving emails. Threads you archive or snooze in Shortwave will still sit waiting for you in your Gmail inbox.
I’m also bummed that the early-access Android app appears to be nothing more than the Shortwave website wrapped into a container, with the most annoying quirk being the Android back gesture often not working as expected for me. This might change before the app goes live in stable, though, with the company telling us that it's planning to completely rebuild its Android app to become a native application, similar to its iOS pendant.
You also need to be comfortable connecting your Gmail account and all of the emails you have saved to it with Shortwave. The company promises to encrypt your data both in transit and at rest on its servers, and given that it has a solid business model (more on that later), it’s unlikely that any of your data will ever get lost in a breach or deliberate action, but it’s still an additional service provider you’ll have to trust next to Google and Gmail itself.
Inbox absolutely nailed all those aspects, with better attachment support, a native Android app, and direct integration with Gmail. But then again, Inbox had all the existing infrastructure from Google to rely on when it launched. We might still have to give Shortwave some time until it receives the same level of polish and performance as Inbox, though some features — like seamless Google account integration — just can’t be achieved by what is essentially a third-party client for your Gmail inbox.
Shortwave’s client is still extremely promising given that this is the first version to go live. There are many thoughtful features, like notification snoozing based on your working hours, intelligent support for handling Gmail filters that might stop emails from showing up in your Shortwave inbox, neat handling of email aliases, automatic signature import from Gmail, and delayed email delivery enabling an undo send option.
Since Shortwave is an independent company, it can’t rely on Google’s sheer unlimited funds to finance itself. As such, Shortwave is free to use only when you don’t need access to more than 90 days of your email history from Gmail. Unlimited history and all kinds of team features for enterprises are locked behind a $9/month subscription per person. Given all these team management features, it's clear that Shortwave mostly wants to focus on business customers, who will get much more out of the $9/person than someone who just wants their full email history to be synced up.
The Android app is currently still in early beta testing, but if you’re interested in giving it a shot, you can follow the instructions over at Shortwave’s website.
UPDATE: 2022/02/19 10:51 EST BY STEVE HUFF
Shortwave responds to Reddit user questions
A member of Shortwave's developer team responded to a Reddit thread about the project, answering questions and adding new information about various features as well as future plans. The poster wrote that Shortwave has "multi-account support on iOS" and that this capability will eventually come to desktop and Android.
One Redditor asked why it was currently not possible to delete emails, which is a common native feature in most Gmail clients. In response, Shortwave said that "[there] were some specific security reviews we had to go through in order to get this permission from Gmail," and that the app now has "new verification," so the ability to delete is Shortwave's top priority.
Asked about archiving mail in specific folders, Shortwave said anything a user marks "done in Shortwave gets archived based on sender (and label). So if you searched for 'notifs@reddit.com' you'd be able to see all of your messages with that email address." The team member also indicated an energy-saving dark theme is in the works, and — to comments about the pricing model — said that currently, "plans are tied per workspace." Anyone who wanted to try a "paid version with multiple accounts" could send a DM and receive promo codes to cover "non-primary accounts."
Thanks: Nick
Shortwave is Google Inbox's spiritual successor made by ex-Googlers, and there's an Android beta to test right now - Android Police
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