14 ms·

Superhuman is what Gmail would be if built today

189 points by Stanleyc23 9y ago

NegativeLatency 9y ago
I'll stick with Mail.app thank you.
- pookeh 9y ago
  Exactly! You can't compete when the features that you think make you stand out the most are also available in free, default and widely-used apps.
  - gnicholas 9y ago
    I use Mail.app also, but man is the search horrendous. I understand that it's supposed to get a lot better (faster, more accurate) in High Sierra, but even Apple employees I know complain about it (and iOS mail search, which is also slow/inaccurate).
tbrock 9y ago
Superhuman is great. I've been lucky enough to have been able to use it for a while now and I'm addicted. The team is super responsive to feedback and take the science of email to the next level.
- patejam 9y ago
  What does it mean to be "addicted" to email? Emails are very important, but in an ideal world I'd spend as minimal time as possible handling emails.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - nashashmi 9y ago
    I once saw a guy first hand with visible addiction to email. He was addicted to email like I was addicted to HN and tech news or other people are addicted to Facebook (news). There's no more news to read yet you still check. There is no more Facebook post yet you still check. There are no more emails for the day yet you still check.
  - wott 9y ago
    I can't tell if the comment to which you answer (and its other reply) is serious or sarcastic: great, lucky, be able to, addicted, team, super, responsive, science of email, next level. Sounds like a bingo (I almost had to keep 50% of the text in my selection...). The reply is of the same kind: changed completely, my relationship (with email!), become indispensable. Plus the "200 mails a day, wow". It reminds me of my former manager, who couldn't be arsed not to destroy the emails I sent him (must have been a zero-inbox maniac): "You know, I have to manage 80, sometimes 100 mails a day." and forced me to recompose them to send them again (because he suddenly couldn't wait that I come back on the machine on which I typed the original mail). Yeah, well, I've been getting 300 to 800 mails a day for the last 25 years and I have them all archived (OK, for the 20 years old ones, they must be on a hard drive... somewhere :-) but you could ask me anything for the last couple of years and I would find it after a few minutes, worst case. I even found my Fidonet netmails a couple of years ago). I never lost a mail since I don't delete any (except the occasional spam which got through anti-spam layers).
- thenanyu 9y ago
  I second this. It's completely changed my relationship with email. I have to process around 200 emails a day as part of my work (full time manager) and Superhuman has become basically indispensable.
  - chairmanwow 9y ago
    Is this just marketing copy they asked you to post in the comments? Few times have a ever spoken so highly of a product. What specifically makes Superhuman "indispensable"? It doesn't really seem like they've innovated that much (nor could they as email is still email)/
    - bastijn 9y ago
      Furthermore, it does not contain any information. Yup, (s)he's a manager alright ;). (J/k) Could you elaborate on how and why it has changed the way you do email and became indispensable?
londons_explore 9y ago
I consider email a bit of a dead tech. Outside the workplace, it's rarely used for personal messages anymore. It's limited to confirmation messages, promotional mailings, forgot password links and that's about it. The days of email are over. Everything moved into silos like WhatsApp because they offer instant responses email could never offer and a nicer UI.
- tectonic 9y ago
  I still use email for just about everything, with some SMS and occasional Twitter mixed in.
- christophilus 9y ago
  I still use and prefer Email. If I want instant communication, I use sms or a phone call... And I almost never use those. At work, I use slack for instant communication, but again, I try to keep it to a minimum.
  - dexterdog 9y ago
    Email is more than instant enough for me.
- AceJohnny2 9y ago
  > Outside the workplace Well good news, workplaces are still a thing and where a lot of economic activity happens. Email provides ubiquitous, traceable, asynchronous, storable messaging. Until something can entirely supplant it I don't see it disappearing anytime soon.
  - Danihan 9y ago
    Exactly. It's almost as if workplaces matter the most, go figure.
  - jrochkind1 9y ago
    why is that good news?
quickben 9y ago
"undo send"?
- mbil 9y ago
  Google Inbox has this feature. There, after sending an email, a small notification appears, allowing you to 'undo' the send for a few seconds. For the small number of times you are too trigger-happy with the Send button, the ability to undo is great.
  - rocky1138 9y ago
    Yup. This feature had been enabled for me for years without use. Then last week I needed it and it made it all worth it.
- drewmate 9y ago
  In reality, I think the only way to do this is just not to let the email leave the bounds of their own servers for x seconds, and then only if the user hasn't canceled in the meantime. Maybe it's possible to do if you host the email for both sender and receiver, but even then, it seems unlikely given the implications of being able to see an email literally disappear from your inbox.
  - stephengillie 9y ago
    Exchange offers this functionality - retract an email sent to internal senders. It sometimes fails with "The sender would like to retract this message" shown above the email.
    - IncRnd 9y ago
      Along those lines, the Outlook developers forgot to implement message recalls on the Mac client.
    - chillwaves 9y ago
      I have only seen this fail. Literally never seen it succeed but we are on O365 so maybe it used to work? Hilarious though to see people try.
sixdimensional 9y ago
"Unlike most browser-based email, which is server-based, Superhuman can store and index gigabytes of email in the web browser itself." Did I miss something, or what technology can store gigabytes in a web browser?! Unless they are compressing email aggressively (possible) and storing in SessionStorage/LocalStorage, decompressing on the fly... then this sounds like marketing fluff, or just written poorly.
- sixdimensional 9y ago
  Never mind... seems it is a Chrome-specific web app... "For this reason, the browser version of the email app only works in Google Chrome"
  - oneplane 9y ago
    So it's a local email client. Basically, what we already have but written in a less efficient language...
    - throwaway91111 9y ago
      Yea, but this enables things like e2e encryption without losing a search index.
      - blibble 9y ago
        if it's a chrome extension there's nothing stopping a court forcing Google to add a modification for a certain user no different to having your javascript decryption routines done by a website
        throwaway91111 9y ago
        Sure, but presumably if you're worried about it you can sideload your own version. Nonetheless you're absolutely correct; i would prefer firefox to chrome.
        9y ago
secfirstmd 9y ago
Sigh...Any chance of better e2e crypt in this email product?
Jedd 9y ago
> “We decided it would be blazingly fast; it would be visually gorgeous; the whole thing would work offline; you wouldn’t need a multitude of browser extensions to get things done; and people would be materially faster at doing their email.” I've not used the previous product(s) this guy has worked on, but from reading TFA, and notably the way they reiterate those claims a few times, I'm confused. First, general nomenclature grumble, using an existing english word as a product name. They seem to be positioning as a superior option to gmail, for current gmail users. Disclaimer - I've been using email since the late 1980's, and gmail since 2004. I've also used a bundle of other mail clients (kmail/kontact, outlook, thunderbird, etc). Gmail is blazingly fast - I've not seen it stall or choke or any tasks Visually gmail looks clean and effective to my eye -- and I don't think gorgeousness would be a compelling reason to move away. Gmail can work fine offline - either mobile device, or the wonderful Gmail Offline extension[1] -- sure, it's Chrom* only, but I gather the 'gigabytes of offline' in this thing is Chrom* only also(?). That extension is fantastic for flights or when I'm working in remote regions, and don't want to deal with a mobile device. Apart from that, I don't have any other gmail-specific extensions - but even if I did, is it believed these are harder to set up and learn than a different mail client? Really at a loss how I could be faster 'at doing my email' -- for people I see who struggle with email, a small portion of their problem is familiarity with the features of their client, but most of it is because their workflow is poor. Rarely is it because the mail client is actually broken and working against you. (Outlook being the obvious exception.) [1] https://gmail.googleblog.com/2011/08/using-gmail-calendar-and-docs-without.html https://gmail.googleblog.com/2011/08/using-gmail-calendar-an...
- bravura 9y ago
  Do you use gmail or inbox now? Can you describe your workflow? One issue I have with gmail is that it takes a million clicks and like 10 seconds to filter email so that I never see that sender/subject/whatever again. Do you have a solution?
  - Jedd 9y ago
    I use gmail app on mobile (and Nine for talking to work Exchange server). I don't use Priority inbox feature. I use incoming filters to apply labels. I try to process each message once - and am happy to archive anything non-actionable. For mail I don't wish to receive or keep, I'll take the time to stop it being sent to me, rather than set up a filter/blocker at my end. For mail I only want to be able to search for later I'll filter to auto-archive on receipt. I try to avoid using my inbox as a todo list - having a separate task tracker makes this possible (different tools vary the ease of this, of course). I suspect most people who struggle with email don't have a task tracker (or if they do, they aren't using that properly either) but that's based on a relatively small set of anecdata. When you say it takes a million clicks and 10 seconds to filter email - do you mean to create a new filter on an arbitrary email? How often are you creating new filters?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
savrajsingh 9y ago
Reminds me of... what was Gabor's email app again?
- nickspag 9y ago
  reMail?
  - savrajsingh 9y ago
    Yes!
1_2__4 9y ago
Admit it, you knew before you clicked that one of its defining features would be even more white space.
- ibash 9y ago
  There's a fix for that: https://dribbble.com/shots/3401818-Superhuman-Hyper-Contrast-Theme https://dribbble.com/shots/3401818-Superhuman-Hyper-Contrast... :)
mxuribe 9y ago
I - for one - certainly hope this gets launched, and gets utilized. This type of application as well as unhosted types of apps are what i hope the future will be. See also http://unhosted.org/adventures/9/Sending-and-receiving-email-from-unhosted-web-apps.html http://unhosted.org/adventures/9/Sending-and-receiving-email...
balladeer 9y ago
I don't see any improvement here. Not visually at least. It's just like Gmail web interface; a bit different, not necessarily a bit better. Also, if adding all the social/people widgets on the sidebar isn't clutter then I wonder what would clutter be. I don't get this idea - "gmail is cluttered". I would like to know if there's something I am missing. It looks sufficiently clean and uncluttered to me at least. And with a decent Internet connection it's fast too. Well, it's definitely not slow. For me the latest source clutter are all these hundreds of new apps/services claiming to fix things which aren't really broken or not fix anything at all. Side-note: Just wondering (it may not be the case), is it common for tech blogs/portals like TC publish sponsored/PR posts without marking the post as such?
rb666 9y ago
Anyone know if they will support custom domains? I will never want to be stuck to domain I don't own again.
jk2323 9y ago
Interesting. OT: As a former PINE/ALPINE User I found that reliable Email clients seem to be rare. There seems not to be much besides Thunderbird and Evolution. I neither got Claws Mail nor iScribe to work with my servers under Linux. Any other email client recommendation for Linux?
- captn3m0 9y ago
  I've been using Geary, but it isn't something I'd recommend. Still feels unpolished (you can't create labels for eg). I also tried out Nylas, which is now open source, but it doesn't support plain text emails. I'm considering moving to evolution or Thunderbird
- danieldk 9y ago
  If you liked Pine/Alpine, you might want to consider mu4e, notmutch-emacs, or mutt-kz. All three are highly customizable text clients that use indexing to get speedy searches and virtual mailboxes in the vain of Google Mail or Fastmail. The Emacs-based clients (mu4e and notmuch-emacs) can also use shr to render HTML mails. (I use mu4e, coming from a mixture of Apple's Mail.app, Google/Fastmail web interface, and mutt.)
- Spivak 9y ago
  If you were a PINE user wouldn't the most natural transition be mutt? It's less of a client and more of a toolbox but I've been pretty happy with it.
- DSMan195276 9y ago
  Personally I've found myself fairly happy using the combo of mutt and mbsync (with gmail). It does unfortunately require downloading all your mail (Which is a bit messy in the beginning since Google sets a limit for how much you can download per month IIRC), but mbsync has been by far the best mail downloader/syncer I've found. I set it up probably well over a year ago now and haven't had to touch my setup or configuration at all, and it has worked perfectly the entire time. It is definitely true that mutt takes a bit of work to tame, but most of my .muttrc is just stuff I copied after googling so it really isn't too crazy. There's tons of basic 'Gmail' .muttrc's out there that you can just modify to use the maildir from mbsync rather then IMAP from gmail.
bastijn 9y ago
Almost all, if not all functionality on their front page is available in Newton email client(s) today. Of course, their main claim, speed is what should set them apart. All the others are not really things that would turn me over. Gmail, Newton (exchange work client) are clean enough. Newton has all other features as superchargers. One thing that I miss in superhuman is integration with Evernote, todoist, you name it. They don't talk about it (or I missed it). Also, for a super clean interface that landing page is not the example I hope. P.s. I hope it will not be exactly like Gmail and have their own email domains. [Name]@superhuman.com is even less professional than Gmail. It's borderline unusable.
Salamat 9y ago
That could explain why Superhuman Chrome has so many open processes in Task Manager and uses so much freaking RAM.
bastijn 9y ago
For those who want to sign up for early access. It is an option to join the paid early access. They forgot to mention this on their sign up page. So take care.
khazhoux 9y ago
Product may turn out well, but the pitch "What would email look like if it were built today?" is literally said every single year.
andybak 9y ago
Does it have an equivalent for Bundles (specifically bundles in the inbox) - the one feature that distinguishes Google Inbox ( https://inbox.google.com https://inbox.google.com ) from every other client as far as I know. I'd be very interested in a competitor for that feature as I couldn't do without it now and I'd like to know I have options if Google retires it or modify it beyond recognition. (Brief summary - they are like smart folders but they appear as a single item in your inbox. It enables me to bundle up various newsletters, server alerts and more broadly themed collections of mail and decide which ones should appear in my inbox immediately, daily or never. If I used traditional folders or labels then they end up forgotten or ignored. It allows you to file/categorize but still maintains the "my inbox is my todo list" paradigm.)
- superlopuh 9y ago
  Spark has something similar. In any case, I've found the tool useful not to triage incoming mail into "read now", and "read later", but into "read at some point", and "unsubscribe immediately".
  - andybak 9y ago
    Spark also has the flaw of being MacOS and iOS only. Sadly I need Android, Windows and MacOS at the very least but I'm much more comfortable knowing something is fully cross-platform wherever possible. Realistically this means browser + Android native + iOS native (unless the browser version is extremely well coded and runs satisfactorily on a mobile browser)
tluyben2 9y ago
Right. From the looks of it that is not true; when Gmail came out and I got an invite, I started by 'importing' all my mail and using it as I was using my own mail server; back then my life was my mailbox and I received 10000 messages a day in folders like spam, server telemetry and so on. Gmail promised scalability and good spam control and 'never delete mail'. I did just that; over the years I have worked with Google engineers to make Gmail better as my particular inbox clogged up stuff regularly especially after the public at large got Gmail. Now it works perfectly and nothing else seems to work for me as it all just dies. But this was a feature and use case for Gmail; not for these guys it seems. Which is fine by the way. Different use case.
awestroke 9y ago
This is an ad written by a PR agency.
- fny 9y ago
  That's pretty much all of TechCrunch's startup section.[0] As far as I know, it's not sponsored content: some editor still rifles through PR agency submissions until she find something that she feels will pique readers' interest. For example, here are the last 10 headlines for that category: - Tracking viewer responses to media, Cinemmerse wants to set the stage for ‘responsive’ entertainment - Rapportive founder’s new startup Superhuman is what Gmail would be if built today - Y Combinator-backed VIDA turns artwork into fashion, accessories and more - Immersv raises $10.5M to shake up mobile advertising with some VR flair - Virtual telescope company Slooh is ready for the eclipse - Original Tech helps banks offer better loan applications - ‘Airbnb for boats’ startup Boatsetter buys competitor Boatbound - LiftIgniter raises $6.4M to bring website personalization to the rest of the internet - Bitcoin wallet ‘Blockchain’ adds Ethereum support - B2B platform Releaf helps African businesses by taking the guesswork out of networking [0]: https://techcrunch.com/startups/ https://techcrunch.com/startups/
gcatalfamo 9y ago
I honestly couldn't tell if the product was interesting due to the amount of marketing speech involved...
amelius 9y ago
The name is a bit odd. What is it called in German? Übermensch?
e12e 9y ago
So, I'm looking at: https://superhuman.com/ https://superhuman.com/ And I can't find pricing, TOS, talk about data access (from the features, it appears they want to pull my mail through their servers?) - and a few features that breaks with good email/netiquette (read notifications, links in email that rely on http(s)). What is this product? What's the monetization plan?
- dingdingdang 9y ago
  Additionally - it's being build to only work on Google Chrome, slimming down their market arbitrarily.
- vacri 9y ago
  > Superhuman, however, is only targeting a fraction of the email market: business users who will pay a subscription for a more powerful client. For this reason, the browser version of the email app only works in Google Chrome. If they're only targeting business users... why don't they also support Edge? Weird. Doubly weird that all their screenshots are in MacOS, which has plenty of safari users, and isn't enterprise-friendly. So they really are carving out a very small niche - small upmarket businesses that are willing to pay for something other than gmail (when paid gmail also gets you the rest of the google apps suite). Feels like a shonky business-case to me - I can't see how they'd competitively price the accounts if they're basically ruling out companies with large user-bases.
  - e12e 9y ago
    Thanks for pointing that out: that at least gives me an idea of what this thing is, beyond the marketing fluff. Now, what kind of email servers/hosts do they support? Exchange? Only Gmail? Any Imap? Pop3? Do they have a policy on tls support? As for market/product/niche - I actually think carving a thin slice out of the business market is a great idea. You could probably get target/interested businesses to pay a pretty premium for a "good email solution", whatever that means for any particular business. I don't think neither exchange nor Gmail would be particularly hard to compete with as a product. Much like some will pay a pretty premium for an ide that boost productivity and/or happiness... That said, I'm now pretty sure I'm not a target customer for superhuman. But that's fine, I whish them best of luck.
KaiserPro 9y ago
Doesn't appear to have folders, or am I missing something? Filters and folders are a god send for me. I get > 1000 emails a day, so inbox zero using the traditional methods (ie sit there and go though them all) are both stupid and impractical.
accnt 9y ago
> "If you want to join our paid early-access VIP program, please reply and let me know :)" If you'd come up with this upfront I wouldn't have signed up.
alpeb 9y ago
I just want an web-based email client that allows me to filter out emails that are not from my contacts. AFAIK gmail can't do that. I hope this does.

189 points by Stanleyc23 9y ago

NegativeLatency 9y ago

I'll stick with Mail.app thank you.

pookeh 9y ago
Exactly! You can't compete when the features that you think make you stand out the most are also available in free, default and widely-used apps.
- gnicholas 9y ago
  I use Mail.app also, but man is the search horrendous. I understand that it's supposed to get a lot better (faster, more accurate) in High Sierra, but even Apple employees I know complain about it (and iOS mail search, which is also slow/inaccurate).

tbrock 9y ago

Superhuman is great. I've been lucky enough to have been able to use it for a while now and I'm addicted. The team is super responsive to feedback and take the science of email to the next level.

patejam 9y ago
What does it mean to be "addicted" to email? Emails are very important, but in an ideal world I'd spend as minimal time as possible handling emails.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- nashashmi 9y ago
  I once saw a guy first hand with visible addiction to email. He was addicted to email like I was addicted to HN and tech news or other people are addicted to Facebook (news). There's no more news to read yet you still check. There is no more Facebook post yet you still check. There are no more emails for the day yet you still check.
- wott 9y ago
  I can't tell if the comment to which you answer (and its other reply) is serious or sarcastic: great, lucky, be able to, addicted, team, super, responsive, science of email, next level. Sounds like a bingo (I almost had to keep 50% of the text in my selection...). The reply is of the same kind: changed completely, my relationship (with email!), become indispensable. Plus the "200 mails a day, wow". It reminds me of my former manager, who couldn't be arsed not to destroy the emails I sent him (must have been a zero-inbox maniac): "You know, I have to manage 80, sometimes 100 mails a day." and forced me to recompose them to send them again (because he suddenly couldn't wait that I come back on the machine on which I typed the original mail). Yeah, well, I've been getting 300 to 800 mails a day for the last 25 years and I have them all archived (OK, for the 20 years old ones, they must be on a hard drive... somewhere :-) but you could ask me anything for the last couple of years and I would find it after a few minutes, worst case. I even found my Fidonet netmails a couple of years ago). I never lost a mail since I don't delete any (except the occasional spam which got through anti-spam layers).
thenanyu 9y ago
I second this. It's completely changed my relationship with email. I have to process around 200 emails a day as part of my work (full time manager) and Superhuman has become basically indispensable.
- chairmanwow 9y ago
  Is this just marketing copy they asked you to post in the comments? Few times have a ever spoken so highly of a product. What specifically makes Superhuman "indispensable"? It doesn't really seem like they've innovated that much (nor could they as email is still email)/
  - bastijn 9y ago
    Furthermore, it does not contain any information. Yup, (s)he's a manager alright ;). (J/k) Could you elaborate on how and why it has changed the way you do email and became indispensable?

londons_explore 9y ago

I consider email a bit of a dead tech. Outside the workplace, it's rarely used for personal messages anymore. It's limited to confirmation messages, promotional mailings, forgot password links and that's about it. The days of email are over. Everything moved into silos like WhatsApp because they offer instant responses email could never offer and a nicer UI.

tectonic 9y ago
I still use email for just about everything, with some SMS and occasional Twitter mixed in.
christophilus 9y ago
I still use and prefer Email. If I want instant communication, I use sms or a phone call... And I almost never use those. At work, I use slack for instant communication, but again, I try to keep it to a minimum.
- dexterdog 9y ago
  Email is more than instant enough for me.
AceJohnny2 9y ago
> Outside the workplace Well good news, workplaces are still a thing and where a lot of economic activity happens. Email provides ubiquitous, traceable, asynchronous, storable messaging. Until something can entirely supplant it I don't see it disappearing anytime soon.
- Danihan 9y ago
  Exactly. It's almost as if workplaces matter the most, go figure.
- jrochkind1 9y ago
  why is that good news?

quickben 9y ago

"undo send"?

mbil 9y ago
Google Inbox has this feature. There, after sending an email, a small notification appears, allowing you to 'undo' the send for a few seconds. For the small number of times you are too trigger-happy with the Send button, the ability to undo is great.
- rocky1138 9y ago
  Yup. This feature had been enabled for me for years without use. Then last week I needed it and it made it all worth it.
drewmate 9y ago
In reality, I think the only way to do this is just not to let the email leave the bounds of their own servers for x seconds, and then only if the user hasn't canceled in the meantime. Maybe it's possible to do if you host the email for both sender and receiver, but even then, it seems unlikely given the implications of being able to see an email literally disappear from your inbox.
- stephengillie 9y ago
  Exchange offers this functionality - retract an email sent to internal senders. It sometimes fails with "The sender would like to retract this message" shown above the email.
  - IncRnd 9y ago
    Along those lines, the Outlook developers forgot to implement message recalls on the Mac client.
  - chillwaves 9y ago
    I have only seen this fail. Literally never seen it succeed but we are on O365 so maybe it used to work? Hilarious though to see people try.

sixdimensional 9y ago

"Unlike most browser-based email, which is server-based, Superhuman can store and index gigabytes of email in the web browser itself." Did I miss something, or what technology can store gigabytes in a web browser?! Unless they are compressing email aggressively (possible) and storing in SessionStorage/LocalStorage, decompressing on the fly... then this sounds like marketing fluff, or just written poorly.

sixdimensional 9y ago
Never mind... seems it is a Chrome-specific web app... "For this reason, the browser version of the email app only works in Google Chrome"
- oneplane 9y ago
  So it's a local email client. Basically, what we already have but written in a less efficient language...
  - throwaway91111 9y ago
    Yea, but this enables things like e2e encryption without losing a search index.
    - blibble 9y ago
      if it's a chrome extension there's nothing stopping a court forcing Google to add a modification for a certain user no different to having your javascript decryption routines done by a website
      - throwaway91111 9y ago
        Sure, but presumably if you're worried about it you can sideload your own version. Nonetheless you're absolutely correct; i would prefer firefox to chrome.
      - 9y ago

secfirstmd 9y ago

Sigh...Any chance of better e2e crypt in this email product?

Jedd 9y ago

> “We decided it would be blazingly fast; it would be visually gorgeous; the whole thing would work offline; you wouldn’t need a multitude of browser extensions to get things done; and people would be materially faster at doing their email.” I've not used the previous product(s) this guy has worked on, but from reading TFA, and notably the way they reiterate those claims a few times, I'm confused. First, general nomenclature grumble, using an existing english word as a product name. They seem to be positioning as a superior option to gmail, for current gmail users. Disclaimer - I've been using email since the late 1980's, and gmail since 2004. I've also used a bundle of other mail clients (kmail/kontact, outlook, thunderbird, etc). Gmail is blazingly fast - I've not seen it stall or choke or any tasks Visually gmail looks clean and effective to my eye -- and I don't think gorgeousness would be a compelling reason to move away. Gmail can work fine offline - either mobile device, or the wonderful Gmail Offline extension[1] -- sure, it's Chrom* only, but I gather the 'gigabytes of offline' in this thing is Chrom* only also(?). That extension is fantastic for flights or when I'm working in remote regions, and don't want to deal with a mobile device. Apart from that, I don't have any other gmail-specific extensions - but even if I did, is it believed these are harder to set up and learn than a different mail client? Really at a loss how I could be faster 'at doing my email' -- for people I see who struggle with email, a small portion of their problem is familiarity with the features of their client, but most of it is because their workflow is poor. Rarely is it because the mail client is actually broken and working against you. (Outlook being the obvious exception.) [1] https://gmail.googleblog.com/2011/08/using-gmail-calendar-and-docs-without.html https://gmail.googleblog.com/2011/08/using-gmail-calendar-an...

bravura 9y ago
Do you use gmail or inbox now? Can you describe your workflow? One issue I have with gmail is that it takes a million clicks and like 10 seconds to filter email so that I never see that sender/subject/whatever again. Do you have a solution?
- Jedd 9y ago
  I use gmail app on mobile (and Nine for talking to work Exchange server). I don't use Priority inbox feature. I use incoming filters to apply labels. I try to process each message once - and am happy to archive anything non-actionable. For mail I don't wish to receive or keep, I'll take the time to stop it being sent to me, rather than set up a filter/blocker at my end. For mail I only want to be able to search for later I'll filter to auto-archive on receipt. I try to avoid using my inbox as a todo list - having a separate task tracker makes this possible (different tools vary the ease of this, of course). I suspect most people who struggle with email don't have a task tracker (or if they do, they aren't using that properly either) but that's based on a relatively small set of anecdata. When you say it takes a million clicks and 10 seconds to filter email - do you mean to create a new filter on an arbitrary email? How often are you creating new filters?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

savrajsingh 9y ago

Reminds me of... what was Gabor's email app again?

nickspag 9y ago
reMail?
- savrajsingh 9y ago
  Yes!

1_2__4 9y ago

Admit it, you knew before you clicked that one of its defining features would be even more white space.

ibash 9y ago
There's a fix for that: https://dribbble.com/shots/3401818-Superhuman-Hyper-Contrast-Theme https://dribbble.com/shots/3401818-Superhuman-Hyper-Contrast... :)

mxuribe 9y ago

I - for one - certainly hope this gets launched, and gets utilized. This type of application as well as unhosted types of apps are what i hope the future will be. See also http://unhosted.org/adventures/9/Sending-and-receiving-email-from-unhosted-web-apps.html http://unhosted.org/adventures/9/Sending-and-receiving-email...

balladeer 9y ago

I don't see any improvement here. Not visually at least. It's just like Gmail web interface; a bit different, not necessarily a bit better. Also, if adding all the social/people widgets on the sidebar isn't clutter then I wonder what would clutter be. I don't get this idea - "gmail is cluttered". I would like to know if there's something I am missing. It looks sufficiently clean and uncluttered to me at least. And with a decent Internet connection it's fast too. Well, it's definitely not slow. For me the latest source clutter are all these hundreds of new apps/services claiming to fix things which aren't really broken or not fix anything at all. Side-note: Just wondering (it may not be the case), is it common for tech blogs/portals like TC publish sponsored/PR posts without marking the post as such?

rb666 9y ago

Anyone know if they will support custom domains? I will never want to be stuck to domain I don't own again.

jk2323 9y ago

Interesting. OT: As a former PINE/ALPINE User I found that reliable Email clients seem to be rare. There seems not to be much besides Thunderbird and Evolution. I neither got Claws Mail nor iScribe to work with my servers under Linux. Any other email client recommendation for Linux?

captn3m0 9y ago
I've been using Geary, but it isn't something I'd recommend. Still feels unpolished (you can't create labels for eg). I also tried out Nylas, which is now open source, but it doesn't support plain text emails. I'm considering moving to evolution or Thunderbird
danieldk 9y ago
If you liked Pine/Alpine, you might want to consider mu4e, notmutch-emacs, or mutt-kz. All three are highly customizable text clients that use indexing to get speedy searches and virtual mailboxes in the vain of Google Mail or Fastmail. The Emacs-based clients (mu4e and notmuch-emacs) can also use shr to render HTML mails. (I use mu4e, coming from a mixture of Apple's Mail.app, Google/Fastmail web interface, and mutt.)
Spivak 9y ago
If you were a PINE user wouldn't the most natural transition be mutt? It's less of a client and more of a toolbox but I've been pretty happy with it.
DSMan195276 9y ago
Personally I've found myself fairly happy using the combo of mutt and mbsync (with gmail). It does unfortunately require downloading all your mail (Which is a bit messy in the beginning since Google sets a limit for how much you can download per month IIRC), but mbsync has been by far the best mail downloader/syncer I've found. I set it up probably well over a year ago now and haven't had to touch my setup or configuration at all, and it has worked perfectly the entire time. It is definitely true that mutt takes a bit of work to tame, but most of my .muttrc is just stuff I copied after googling so it really isn't too crazy. There's tons of basic 'Gmail' .muttrc's out there that you can just modify to use the maildir from mbsync rather then IMAP from gmail.

bastijn 9y ago

Almost all, if not all functionality on their front page is available in Newton email client(s) today. Of course, their main claim, speed is what should set them apart. All the others are not really things that would turn me over. Gmail, Newton (exchange work client) are clean enough. Newton has all other features as superchargers. One thing that I miss in superhuman is integration with Evernote, todoist, you name it. They don't talk about it (or I missed it). Also, for a super clean interface that landing page is not the example I hope. P.s. I hope it will not be exactly like Gmail and have their own email domains. [Name]@superhuman.com is even less professional than Gmail. It's borderline unusable.

Salamat 9y ago

That could explain why Superhuman Chrome has so many open processes in Task Manager and uses so much freaking RAM.

bastijn 9y ago

For those who want to sign up for early access. It is an option to join the paid early access. They forgot to mention this on their sign up page. So take care.

khazhoux 9y ago

Product may turn out well, but the pitch "What would email look like if it were built today?" is literally said every single year.

andybak 9y ago

Does it have an equivalent for Bundles (specifically bundles in the inbox) - the one feature that distinguishes Google Inbox ( https://inbox.google.com https://inbox.google.com ) from every other client as far as I know. I'd be very interested in a competitor for that feature as I couldn't do without it now and I'd like to know I have options if Google retires it or modify it beyond recognition. (Brief summary - they are like smart folders but they appear as a single item in your inbox. It enables me to bundle up various newsletters, server alerts and more broadly themed collections of mail and decide which ones should appear in my inbox immediately, daily or never. If I used traditional folders or labels then they end up forgotten or ignored. It allows you to file/categorize but still maintains the "my inbox is my todo list" paradigm.)

superlopuh 9y ago
Spark has something similar. In any case, I've found the tool useful not to triage incoming mail into "read now", and "read later", but into "read at some point", and "unsubscribe immediately".
- andybak 9y ago
  Spark also has the flaw of being MacOS and iOS only. Sadly I need Android, Windows and MacOS at the very least but I'm much more comfortable knowing something is fully cross-platform wherever possible. Realistically this means browser + Android native + iOS native (unless the browser version is extremely well coded and runs satisfactorily on a mobile browser)

tluyben2 9y ago

Right. From the looks of it that is not true; when Gmail came out and I got an invite, I started by 'importing' all my mail and using it as I was using my own mail server; back then my life was my mailbox and I received 10000 messages a day in folders like spam, server telemetry and so on. Gmail promised scalability and good spam control and 'never delete mail'. I did just that; over the years I have worked with Google engineers to make Gmail better as my particular inbox clogged up stuff regularly especially after the public at large got Gmail. Now it works perfectly and nothing else seems to work for me as it all just dies. But this was a feature and use case for Gmail; not for these guys it seems. Which is fine by the way. Different use case.

awestroke 9y ago

This is an ad written by a PR agency.

fny 9y ago
That's pretty much all of TechCrunch's startup section.[0] As far as I know, it's not sponsored content: some editor still rifles through PR agency submissions until she find something that she feels will pique readers' interest. For example, here are the last 10 headlines for that category: - Tracking viewer responses to media, Cinemmerse wants to set the stage for ‘responsive’ entertainment - Rapportive founder’s new startup Superhuman is what Gmail would be if built today - Y Combinator-backed VIDA turns artwork into fashion, accessories and more - Immersv raises $10.5M to shake up mobile advertising with some VR flair - Virtual telescope company Slooh is ready for the eclipse - Original Tech helps banks offer better loan applications - ‘Airbnb for boats’ startup Boatsetter buys competitor Boatbound - LiftIgniter raises $6.4M to bring website personalization to the rest of the internet - Bitcoin wallet ‘Blockchain’ adds Ethereum support - B2B platform Releaf helps African businesses by taking the guesswork out of networking [0]: https://techcrunch.com/startups/ https://techcrunch.com/startups/

gcatalfamo 9y ago

I honestly couldn't tell if the product was interesting due to the amount of marketing speech involved...

amelius 9y ago

The name is a bit odd. What is it called in German? Übermensch?

e12e 9y ago

So, I'm looking at: https://superhuman.com/ https://superhuman.com/ And I can't find pricing, TOS, talk about data access (from the features, it appears they want to pull my mail through their servers?) - and a few features that breaks with good email/netiquette (read notifications, links in email that rely on http(s)). What is this product? What's the monetization plan?

dingdingdang 9y ago
Additionally - it's being build to only work on Google Chrome, slimming down their market arbitrarily.
vacri 9y ago
> Superhuman, however, is only targeting a fraction of the email market: business users who will pay a subscription for a more powerful client. For this reason, the browser version of the email app only works in Google Chrome. If they're only targeting business users... why don't they also support Edge? Weird. Doubly weird that all their screenshots are in MacOS, which has plenty of safari users, and isn't enterprise-friendly. So they really are carving out a very small niche - small upmarket businesses that are willing to pay for something other than gmail (when paid gmail also gets you the rest of the google apps suite). Feels like a shonky business-case to me - I can't see how they'd competitively price the accounts if they're basically ruling out companies with large user-bases.
- e12e 9y ago
  Thanks for pointing that out: that at least gives me an idea of what this thing is, beyond the marketing fluff. Now, what kind of email servers/hosts do they support? Exchange? Only Gmail? Any Imap? Pop3? Do they have a policy on tls support? As for market/product/niche - I actually think carving a thin slice out of the business market is a great idea. You could probably get target/interested businesses to pay a pretty premium for a "good email solution", whatever that means for any particular business. I don't think neither exchange nor Gmail would be particularly hard to compete with as a product. Much like some will pay a pretty premium for an ide that boost productivity and/or happiness... That said, I'm now pretty sure I'm not a target customer for superhuman. But that's fine, I whish them best of luck.

KaiserPro 9y ago

Doesn't appear to have folders, or am I missing something? Filters and folders are a god send for me. I get > 1000 emails a day, so inbox zero using the traditional methods (ie sit there and go though them all) are both stupid and impractical.

accnt 9y ago

> "If you want to join our paid early-access VIP program, please reply and let me know :)" If you'd come up with this upfront I wouldn't have signed up.

alpeb 9y ago

I just want an web-based email client that allows me to filter out emails that are not from my contacts. AFAIK gmail can't do that. I hope this does.