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Show HN: Shortwave: Enjoy Your Inbox

224 points by mayop100 5y ago

I’m thrilled to finally be able to show everyone what we’ve been working on for the last 2 years. We’re re-inventing the email experience to help you email smarter and faster, so you can get more done, and maybe even actually enjoy your inbox. When we launched Firebase here 10 years ago, HN was tough but fair, and I expect no less this time around! I hope you’ll check out what we’ve built and share your feedback. I’ll be around here all day and am happy to answer any questions. Let us know what you think!

agentdrtran 5y ago
Why no delete button?
- mayop100 5y ago
  It's coming! Very top of our to-do list!
samwillis 5y ago
Always great to see people innovating on email clients, everyone is different and would have they own best way to manage their email for themselves. So any new option is always good. Out of interest, you have started with Gmail which is understandable but do you have planes to support order email services or even just plain IMAP? I know Gmail is complicated as it doesn't really do IMAP properly and so it better to use their api, so you have to chose one of the other to start. But I hope you have plans to support IMAP.
- mayop100 5y ago
  We would very much like to support other services in the future. Rather than using IMAP, we integrate with Gmail's APIs from our servers. This allows us to have a new client-server protocol that supports a bunch of new stuff -- like faster real-time updates, better latency compensation and offline handling, bundled inboxes, more interesting triage flows, emoji reactions, presence, etc. The downside of this is obviously that we have to do a customer integration with Gmail to do this. But fortunately it's not too complex, and we intend to support other services in the future. And maybe, in the _long term_, improve the protocols so this integration can be more standard.
  - jtsiskin 5y ago
    It’s not a business critique at all; it’s just always a little sad to see awesome tools built that only work for the dominant player in the space. Just another few inches in the moat which makes it harder for an new startup to compete. It may make total sense and be the most rational choice for your business, it’s just unfortunate various systems have made this the case
peakaboo 5y ago
We need this but not for Google. What's the point of a nice inbox when you are getting spied on and sold to advertisers?
- stronglikedan 5y ago
  One has nothing to do with the other. I would like a nice inbox for my Gmail, despite not caring about being spied on and my info being sold. I'm not alone, judging by the amount of folks that wax nostalgic about Google's Inbox.
deleted 5y ago
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bsimpson 5y ago
This layout and color palette are strongly evocative of Inbox. Without knowing anything about your company, I'd presume you're trying to recreate Inbox. Is that intentional?
- mayop100 5y ago
  Many of us were Inbox users and miss it! We're trying to do more than Inbox did, but we were certainly inspired be it :)
jbverschoor 5y ago
No thank you.. all these apps either want gmail way too many gmail permissions, and/or are hosted. I know the other solution is (currently) IMAP, but that's just fine.. You could use the messageids to create the extra functionality. Some solutions use IMAP folders, which is a pain in the ass. Also... I'm trying to get rid of gmail lol Congrats on launching though, but it's not for me.
TIPSIO 5y ago
Love email apps! Congrats. Honestly, it will be really hard get me to leave Front. I have never used a more productive app for my personal workflow - especially with a team. This is seriously super awesome though. Some misc. feedback/comments: - Front has Team Comments (private and between email messages) that are pure gold for collaborating responses and sharing drafts / notes. - What you all have here with Grouping or "Bundles" is top shelf. Especially the interface and speed of things. I actually tried to get Front to add this in some one off survey two years ago. This allows such a better UX layer of organization than Tags/Folders or Merging emails. Seriously bravo and perfect. - It's not clear if there's a way to manually create a Bundle. For example, I once asked a client to send me 15 photos, they sent it over 15 emails. I would like to manually "Bundle" and merge those emails basically forever. Edit: Apparently you can drag to do this... superb. - Team Inboxes are really useful and I am trying to figure out if Bundles kind of replaces this. - Don't care for Workspaces at all from what I can tell. Maybe my team is too small though. Just don't care for chat that much / use other stuff. - Beyond Bundles, an almost Trello style organization for flow on "Bundles" could be useful as another layer. Attaching a screenshot of how I do it in Front from start of project to end of project life: https://imgur.com/a/eJ73oDF https://imgur.com/a/eJ73oDF - Front is a total mess when it comes to Tags vs Folders and Emojis. What you all have here is really gorgeous. Prop to design team as you can tell this was extremely thoughtful. - Personally don't care for the gif or emoji stuff since email (to me at least) has always been a formal form of communication.
- mayop100 5y ago
  Thanks for the detailed thoughts! And for the kind words in here :) Re: team features -- we have Workspaces and Channels that let you solve many of the same use cases as Front. Check out our guide here including a quick video intro: https://www.shortwave.com/docs/guides/team/ https://www.shortwave.com/docs/guides/team/ To clarify -- while you can use Channels / Workspaces for general team chat, the main purpose is to help you collaborate on emails, like Front does. Front is more focused on the support use case. We're trying to build something a bit more general purpose, for people like founders, PMs, UX researchers, biz dev, etc to bring visibility to their external emails to their teammates. You can manually group threads with drag-and-drop to create custom bundles today. You can't yet have those filters apply to future emails, but we'd very much like to do this (and a bunch of other powerful bundle features).
dang 5y ago
> When we launched Firebase here 10 years ago, Show HN: Firebase, a scalable real-time backend - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3832877 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3832877 - April 2012 (137 comments) (I'm marking this off topic so it will go to the bottom of the page and hopefully not distract from the new thing.)
josephwegner 5y ago
I'll add in a vote for IMAP support. I am anti-Google in almost all regards. Currently I use FastMail as my email provider, and Mail.app as my client. I pay for FastMail, and similarly I would very gladly pay for a good cross-platform mail client. I'd sign up for a yearly subscription, even! I do recognize that IMAP is not as rich a data source as GMails API, but I'd encourage you to not feel limited by that. I don't mind using hosted email, as long as the revenue source is coming from my wallet, rather than ads. I even had spec'd out building an OSS self-hosted server that ingested email via IMAP and then stored metadata in its own database - this had the benefit of being as rich as GMail APIs, but me as a user still getting to own my data.
- mayop100 5y ago
  Noted!
- billyjobob 5y ago
  Fastmail created https://jmap.io/ https://jmap.io/ as an open alternative to the GMail API.
  - artdigital 5y ago
    jmap is great, but while it's an 'open alternative', afaik currently fastmail is using it, so adding support for jmap would still not make the client available to more services
- lf-non 5y ago
  There is mailspring which I have been using for some time - it has a nice modern interface which imho is much better than thunderbird as well as most of the web interfaces of self hosted email. Based on electron though, so ymmv. https://getmailspring.com/ https://getmailspring.com/
  - jlkuester7 5y ago
    +1 for MailSpring! It is easily the best desktop email application I have ever used!
bberenberg 5y ago
I think the challenge I have with all of these email apps is always consistent. Gmail is a foundation, I use tools on top of it. Especially once I hop to mobile, do you have a clear strategy for integration with common extensions like HubSpot?
etcet 5y ago
I am one of those Google Inbox refugees and this definitely piques my interest. The pricing does not really make sense for personal user ($9/mo for a email client). Could you elaborate on the free plan 90 day limit? If I snooze an email for 100 days, will I ever see it? Please try to convince me that this limit will not be annoying enough that I should take the risk of linking my Gmail account.
- kirillzubovsky 5y ago
  I am curious why you think that $9/m does not make sense. Is that too much, or too little, and why for either case?
  - etcet 5y ago
    I've spent $0 on email clients the last 20 years I've been using email. At $9/mo, if I used this service, I would have spent $2,160 on an email client. If I imagine a scenario where someone tells me they can turn GMail into Google Inbox, I would consider a one-time $20 a fair price and could maybe be stretched to $60 with some convincing.
- mayop100 5y ago
  Your email will still come back, and you'll see it in your inbox, but you won't see it in search results. And emails from more than 90 days before you signed up won't be imported.
  - dash2 5y ago
    I think the problem is that when you need to search for an email, you really need to know if you got anything or not. And for most of us, we can't wade through the 100s of emails we get a day. So this would really cut me off from my old email, which I think is a showstopper. Otherwise, it looks nice and interesting.
buttocks 5y ago
Feedback: Email is just fine. It is mature and should just be left alone. It is not something that should be reinvented. The next thing should not be email at all. It should be something fundamentally different, not another iteration of email. Seeing some downvote criticism on this comment, let me clarify. I understand the value in working on an established set of federated protocols. Everyone has an email address and this is a very convenient way to start. But it was invented decades ago and has had many kludges bolted on to it to deal with problems or to very slightly improve the user experience. Who's instead going to be more bold and go for a greenfield project to do asynchronous personal communications?
- sigmaprimus 5y ago
  I wonder if this is true or not, personally I don't use email enough to invest in a product like this ATM but have been kicking the idea of starting a home based business up for a while now and think something like this would fit quite well. Saying Email is just fine or whatever is along the lines of the re-inventing the wheel argument yet every once in a while someone does exactly that and the world is a better place for it! *Edit* The one thing that makes me a bit nervous is signing up with my google account, I wish there was more information on the security behind doing this, in other words am I handing the keys to the kingdom over to a 3rd party by doing this? Is my google account subject to any vulnerabilities this app may or may not have? These questions make me reluctant to "Sign Up" especially for a trial.
- jlkuester7 5y ago
  I don't get the down-votes on this comment either. (Other then maybe HN is not really the place where folks like to "leave things alone...".) Email is a fact of life and it is not going anywhere, but in general I would prefer communicating over the Matrix protocol. There is plenty of innovation and development still needed in the messaging space, but continuing to view email as the core technology to build on top of is unnecessarily limiting. (Note that this is not a criticism of the Shortwave team as we all need great email clients! I am just concurring that there are protocols that are fundamentally better than email...)
- networkimprov 5y ago
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
From the article: > Inbox Zero might be impractical every day, but Inbox Organized happens without breaking a sweat. My experience is the absolute opposite. Organising mails is a strange game, and the only winning move is not to play. I get the information out of the emails as soon as I can, and put it into a system that is actually manageable. GTD had it right from the start. Thank you David Allen. You want harsh feedback ? I'll never pay for your system, because it would lead to more work for me on the long run, not less. Emails are not todo list: todo list are mostly signal, while emails are mostly noise. Your system organize noise, and automatically. This has no value to me. But you could build a system that I actually need. An inbox that I would enjoy. Indeed, I don't need a system that help me organise my various sources of informations and tasks. I have so many of them that would be terrible even if it worked, anyway. Managing 20 organized systems in parallel is hell. I need systems that make it easy to extract the relevant informations from them, and put the result in one central organized place for action, and another one for archive. A system that filters noise, and get me in control. That's it. Eventually, my life is just that: being, doing and knowing. I don't need a system for the first. I don't want more than 2 systems for the 2 last.
- jdauriemma 5y ago
  > Organising mails is a strange game, and the only winning move is not to play. I laughed out loud at this, because you are 100% correct.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
    How about a nice game of chess?
    - alberth 5y ago
      Love the War Games reference. https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/5d7f5bc3-4ceb-4d18-87f7-a146f9cb043f https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/5d7f5bc3-4ceb-4d18-87f7-a146f9c...
  - xyst 5y ago
    So true. I found that if an issue is really important, then they will find a way to contact you or it resolves automatically. If I really need to get a context, I'll search for the recipient's name and get instant context on the "issue". My solution is just to never delete any e-mails. Inbox zero is a complete waste of time for me.
smallerfish 5y ago
I realize building on gmail gives you an acquisition audience :) and also that hosting your own email infrastructure is hard, but I think it'd be a far more compelling offering if this was standalone. Google have created the opportunity by cutting the free tier for grandfathered plans - lots of people are looking for alternatives to gmail. In all honesty I'll probably pay $6/mo to gmail for now, but I'm unlikely to stick with them long term. Come up with a compelling standalone platform that's better than Hey or Fastmail and I'll be interested.
- owaislone 5y ago
  It doesn't have to be one or the other. It can start with Gmail and later offer a hosted solution as well.
gab007 5y ago
Not for me, but.. A honest question - now, when G suite legacy free edition is closing down, here's a chance to offer a service that's not "piggy-backing" on gmail (or any other provider). You could "re-create Inbox" by providing email hosting with same/similar features - already lined up on your page.
- martin-adams 5y ago
  Wouldn't that be a huge effort though, as you'd have to essentially implement deliverability and spam all from scratch, all while trying to convince gmail users to switch. I tried Hey and found that it just wasn't going to work for me as they wanted to 'own' my email.
  - creeble 5y ago
    Interesting, can you expand on why Hey 'owned' your email? I guess no access outside their app?
    - austhrow743 5y ago
      For a long while Hey didn’t support personal domains. Had to use @hey.com
    - thunderrabbit 5y ago
      And Hey explicitly doesn't support IMAP
ocdtrekkie 5y ago
It seems like an absolutely critical flaw to build a business entirely dependent on another company's proprietary service, which also is technically a competitor.
- rockwotj 5y ago
  Shortwaver here! There are a number of other companies that have started out exclusively on Gmail like us. It's also a risk to stand up a new SMTP service while trying to stay off SMTP blacklists, greylists, and keeping mail out of spam filters. Building on Gmail has allowed us to prove out our product market fit more quickly without spending as much time on getting these deliverability issues solved. However, in the future we'd love to have our own SMTP service as an option in addition to Gmail.
mosselman 5y ago
I am trying this out and I like the grouping and 'marking is done' feature. To be honest, you can't do much worse than the default gmail interface and ui, there is so much low hanging fruit there. What I liked less is the tiny print and tiny UI elements of shortwave in general. I 'solved' this by zooming in a lot, but in general it is hard to see at a glance who e-mails are from, which seems like a pretty important thing. The focus of the design seems to be about being pretty, not being functional as much as I'd have liked. Again, better than gmail in aesthetics, but the typography could use some attention.
owaislone 5y ago
The product looks great. One question: does it sync everything to shortwave servers? If I download the desktop app, will everything still be synced to the servers? I'd be fine with most of my email being copied by a service like this but thinking of emails like OTPs, account resets, bank/credit card and social security authorizations makes me a bit too uncomfortable. I wish this had a denylist of some sort to never some sync mail.
- mayop100 5y ago
  Good question. Yes, we do sync your mail to our servers. We need to do this to provide many of the features we have. We are taking security very seriously and are doing everything we can to dot our i's and cross our t's. Our engineering team is ex-Google / ex-Firebase engineers with lots of experience building high security, high reliability data systems at Google.
  - owaislone 5y ago
    Just tried it and have a bug report: back button is completely broken. I opened a category/group then openened an email, clicked mouse side button (which is bound to back button of browser) and it took me to a completely random email thread. No matter how many times I try it, it takes me back to the same thread. I never opened the thread before I was taken there by the back button.
  - owaislone 5y ago
    Can I request a feature? I'd love Shortwave to ignore a specific folder or label in Gmail. I can then label stuff I deem extra sensitive and it would never leave Gmail. This would give a lot of people peace of mind when trying Shortwave.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
o_____________o 5y ago
Always eager to try new mail clients. when is multi-account support landing?
- rockwotj 5y ago
  Shortwaver here - we'd love you have you give Shortwave a try! We already support multi-account for our iOS app. We would love to bring this to the web/PWA soon!
groby_b 5y ago
I'll be blunt: Anything that promises me a "more enjoyable" inbox, and then advertises with cat pictures and what-do-we-do-for-lunch threads is missing the mark for me. I don't want more fluff in my inbox. I especially don't want anything that helps people "email faster". It's not productive, it just makes more noise. E-mail is a medium for half-baked thoughts quickly dashed off to put them on somebody else's plate. Find a way to reduce e-mail, to help people write more well thought out messages, and I'll be absolutely delighted.
- mayop100 5y ago
  Keep in mind that the alternative to sending an email is not sending nothing... it's usually to send a text, or a Slack message, or something else that is even less thought through. We try to consolidate all of your communications in one place and give you the tools to write thoughtful things. Don't be confused by the fun examples. Everyone likes cats (those are my actual cats) so we put them in the post, but you certainly can send more important emails :)
  - groby_b 5y ago
    I didn't say it was an easy problem to solve. Any hypothetical fix to the dumpster fire that is my inbox would need to increase both friction of sending in the first place and the value of using the tool anyways. And so, no, I'm not confused by the fun examples. I'm fairly clear that they're actively detrimental to me. (I may just not be your audience)
- 1123581321 5y ago
  You sound confused by the examples which are there to show the interface. You can write anything you want in an email message and send as few of them as you want. Anyone who knows they are looking at an email app's landing page will understand that the compose fields are freeform.
BasilPH 5y ago
I would be really interested in this if it had a focus mode, that hides e-mails and delivers them to me in batches. I loved Tempo[1], but unfortunately they ran out of money, which shows how tough this space is. [1]: https://www.yourtempo.co https://www.yourtempo.co
- rockwotj 5y ago
  Shortwaver here! We've had a few former tempo users switch over to Shortwave and are enjoying the product. We have a few features with bundles that we really want to build that would allow you to replicate a Tempo like workflow of triaging your email in batches.
lucb1e 5y ago
Just as one data point, this looks great but there is no way I could use a web mail client for security reasons (as a security consultant, we use PGP a lot and need a local email provider). In the comments I see it only works with Google servers to boot. I'm not sure if this will ever be for me as well, but I'd love something like paying a small fee for a version of Thunderbird with one or more of these features patched in.
- jwngr 5y ago
  Shortwave cofounder here. We totally get that. Gmail is just the start for us. We plan to support more providers in the future and even become our own provider long-term. Read more about our company mission on our blog [1]. [1] https://www.shortwave.com/blog/future-of-messaging/ https://www.shortwave.com/blog/future-of-messaging/
dudus 5y ago
I must say I loved it. In 10min I cleared my inbox which I was postponing for a few weeks. I actually love that this is tied to Gmail. The integration means I can move back at any time by just deleting my shortwave account so it's very low risk for me. Also it's top notch, it imported all my aliases and signatures.
- rockwotj 5y ago
  Thank you for the kind words!
fareesh 5y ago
People have more than 1 unread email? In the regular inbox? really?
- brandonmenc 5y ago
  My inboxes are all in the 100,000s of messages. I have a few broad search filters (example, at work: internal email vs outside email.) I star or bookmark things I need to come back to (and then un-star them afterwards.) I use text search to find everything else. I treat it like a giant single chat history. I have never not been able to find an email when I need to, and I never miss a message. Life is too short to waste time trying to maintain "inbox zero."
- pmontra 5y ago
  My email goes through K9 on Android first (5.6, the next version broke this workflow and despised about half of its users. Look for k9 overview screen to appreciate the drama and look at the distribution of the stars of the app.) I use K9 to look at the titles of the messages I get on my POP3 accounts. I don't remove the messages from the servers. I disable notifications and polling. I have to manually check my accounts. This is not to be distracted. Really urgent matters ring my phone. Customers reach me on slack (only on desktop.) IMs are for real time communication. Email is for low priority communication. I check it a few times per day, less than five. I read immediately the important messages and I reply from there, automatically BCC to me. I delete the cruft (the notifications I don't have to archive, invites to events I won't go to, etc.) For many messages the title is the only important signal. Later on, not every day, I download mail on my laptop with Thunderbird. This deletes email from the POP3 servers so it makes it unavailable to the phone. Messages are organized into a few hundred of folders, either by sender or project. Filters do it (create it once, use forever.) This means that I already read the email, at least its title, and I rarely have to read it again on the computer. I got thousands of unread messages there and I have read only the title of many of them, only on the phone. I've got messages dating back to 1994. Of course I'm an outlier (but consider how many people want the old K9 back) and of course predicting how people use stuff is very hard. It would be nice to have an IMAP server over my Thunderbird folder to look at every message from my phone. It's been 10 years since I told me that maybe I should self host one and I never did it, so it's probably not very important though.
edf13 5y ago
Why do we need/want inbox zero? Isn’t that a false promise of modern life? Inbox zero isn’t possible or even necessary
- ssss11 5y ago
  Yeah I’ve given up on inbox zero. Inbox is my filing cabinet and that just works.
- dmd 5y ago
  I fail to hit zero fewer than three times a month. It's absolutely possible.
- jwngr 5y ago
  "Inbox Zero" is 100% not the goal with Shortwave and you won't see it in our marketing. Not to be too cheeky, but "Inbox Organized" is the goal. We want to help you treat your inbox like the to-do list that it is, not necessarily smash every email that enters your inbox. Read more about our workflow in our docs. [1] [1] https://www.shortwave.com/docs/guides/101/ https://www.shortwave.com/docs/guides/101/
- brimble 5y ago
  I've found it's both achievable and a worthwhile way to operate if and only if nearly all of your emails come from humans, and not very many of them. As soon as transactional emails and marketing mailer scripts start to take over, or long-running CC noise, it's hopeless and fighting it's not worth the time. Forget about it and rely on search. Maybe auto-categorize some senders you want to break through the noise, but anything past that isn't a good use of time (though it may be satisfying, which is enough justification if you're into that kind of thing) Failing that, skimming the inbox for important messages you missed then hitting archive-all at the end of the day can do it, but it's sort-of cheating and I'm not sure how valuable it is. Periodically auto-archiving anything older than X hours can be nice, but won't (often) get you to Inbox Zero.
  - BeetleB 5y ago
    > As soon as transactional emails and marketing mailer scripts start to take over, or long-running CC noise, it's hopeless and fighting it's not worth the time. Forget about it and rely on search. The alternative, which works very well for me, is to have a whitelist and only allow that to hit your inbox. Then allow humans to get on to your whitelist: http://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2018/Sep/solving-my-email-problem/ http://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2018/Sep/solving-my-email-proble... It's trivial to filter out the noise, because by default it filters everything out. You do a tiny amount of work to whitelist the humans. Inbox Zero definitely works with that setup.
rpadovani 5y ago
> We collect information that alone or in combination with other information in our possession could be used to identify you (“Personal Data”) as follows: > Email Data: we collect your email address and the contents of any emails and messages you draft or receive in our Service, as well as associated metadata (such as the time sent). I understand the technical need, but no thanks, I would prefer some local client. Especially given that: > In certain circumstances we may share the categories of Personal Data described above with the following categories of third parties without further notice to you: [...] > we may share Personal Data with vendors and service providers, including providers of hosting services, payment processors, email communication software and email newsletter services, customer relationship management and customer support services, and web analytics services. So you (could) share my (business) emails with more or less everybody in the world? Hard pass.
- mayop100 5y ago
  [Founder & CEO here] We will never sell your data, track you, or advertise to you. We only share this information as necessary to provide the service (for example, by storing it on Google Cloud Platform).
  - e12e 5y ago
    You won't - but you cannot meaningfully guarantee you will never sell the company?
  - shanxS 5y ago
    Is it possible to store the data, extracted from my data, your service needs in my Google Cloud somewhere or will it expose your secret sauce?
  - chrisjj 5y ago
    "We only share this information as necessary to provide the service" That statement would be reassuring... but for the fact it fails to accord with your privacy policy, clause 1.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Hard_Space 5y ago
For me the killer feature would be to entirely withhold incoming mail from specified email addresses or email domains until weekday working hours. No bolded 'pending' folder, no indication that you're being communicated with by business concerns in your leisure time...I'd pay an extra fee every year just for that one feature.
- jwngr 5y ago
  Agreed! This is definitely on our list and we've got big plans here. Added your +1 to our internal task tracking this feature :)
- ehaughee 5y ago
  Check out https://www.hey.com/ https://www.hey.com/. I've found once I categorized the majority of my regular senders to either go to paper trail or feed, I get so little actual mail. Then when I want to go see my feed for Patagonia's latest marketing mail, I can. No number says how many are there, nothing is bold. Just a click or two and I'm looking at my feed. It can even auto-delete after 30 days if you want. Despite the fact that it may sound like it, I am not affiliated with Hey, just a happy user.
- thesuitonym 5y ago
  It seems so crazy to me that no major mail app has figured this out. Why can't I mute my work email after work hours?
  - illnewsthat 5y ago
    You can do that in Outlook. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/manage-your-notifications-in-outlook-mobile-d3b5a22b-919c-4d30-a26f-ae9a0a78ba90 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/manage-your-notif...
- BeetleB 5y ago
  I use notmuch for my email workflow. It has Python APIs. This is trivial to do with it. The downside is that it's for PCs, not phones. I suppose one could hack a mail server around its tags so you could use it via the phone as well. Never thought about it... https://notmuchmail.org/ https://notmuchmail.org/
rabscuttler 5y ago
This looks great, congrats - it’s great to see innovation and creativity in the email space. I’ve just got through my first week with Superhuman, which I’ve found really productive, particularly the keyboard shortcuts. Your marketing copy seemed to make a few references to that product if I’m not mistaken. Aside from the price ($30/m for Superhuman vs $9/m for Shortwave) would you save me the trouble and outline what you see as key differentiators? It seems like you’re targeting enterprise / teams which looks great for a work account but less useful for a personal one.
- jwngr 5y ago
  Thanks! Our keyboard shortcuts are pretty extensive too [1]. Let us know if there's a shortcut missing that you'd like to see! Beyond price, there are a handful of examples [2], but I'll focus on two big things that set Shortwave apart: (1) An opinionated triage flow. Bundles group together related senders to make your inbox more scannable, while our triage actions (Pin / Snooze / Done) and drag 'n drop allow you to treat your inbox like the to-do list that it is. [3] We lean into the fact that inbox zero is not a realistic goal for many email users. (2) Team features. We bring Slack-like channels into your email inbox and give you the notification controls to make that possible. [4] Shortwave eliminates the boundary between your team and the rest of the world. And things like emoji reactions, mentions, and a chat-like interface make it feel unlike any email client you've used before. [1] https://www.shortwave.com/docs/references/shortcuts/ https://www.shortwave.com/docs/references/shortcuts/ [2] https://www.shortwave.com/features/ https://www.shortwave.com/features/ [3] https://www.shortwave.com/docs/guides/101/ https://www.shortwave.com/docs/guides/101/ [4] https://www.shortwave.com/docs/guides/team/ https://www.shortwave.com/docs/guides/team/
derekzhouzhen 5y ago
Neat. However, is Gmail backing this? Otherwise, Gmail could mess it up badly any time, right?
scrozier 5y ago
I know that people use their inboxes as to-do lists, but I no of no one who likes it or does it well. Use a plain ol' email account and a decent to-do list. I've been doing it for years and get to inbox zero daily. Feels so good. :-) Putting lipstick on the email/to-do list pig is a step in the wrong direction.
mcs_ 5y ago
Congratulations on the release!!! Do you support/plan to support personal certificates or PGP somehow? It will be fantastic to bring those functionalities to the mainstream.
- rockwotj 5y ago
  We'd love to better support PGP and multipart/encrypted emails - we have been focusing on nailing our UX and our client experience. But we have grand plans[1] to improve the underlying protocol, and part of that is making e2e encryption the default experience. [1]: https://www.shortwave.com/blog/future-of-messaging/ https://www.shortwave.com/blog/future-of-messaging/
haolez 5y ago
By looking at the screenshot, I can see that it's more complex than Hey, which is the service I'm currently using and am very happy with. I hope this data point helps, somehow. Good luck!
nfkx120 5y ago
smoyer 5y ago
I'm in the process of leaving Google ... I'd love desktop and mobile clients that work with my email servers via IMAP and SMTP.
- rockwotj 5y ago
  We'd love to build IMAP & SMTP integration into Shortwave! We'll get to it :)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
YPPH 5y ago
I note the tagline says "Enjoy your inbox". This is liable to create the impression the service is platform-neutral, but it is not. It relies solely on the Gmail API? I don't use Gmail, so your product doesn't work for me. A simple way to fix this is to adjust the title to the more accurate, "Enjoy your Gmail inbox", thereby enabling us to determine whether it is usable or not. In the long run, I hope you consider platform-neutral JMAP support once it has matured.
- crossroadsguy 5y ago
  To be fair that's literally the 2nd line on the landing page: "Email smarter & faster with a reinvented experience for your Gmail", with the first line having an underlined "Enjoy" - I believe to double convince the future users. On the other hand it definitely looks like another snake oil email client in a long list of snake oil email clients. My another guess is (and I maybe wrong) - it is entirely electron or web based - the apps I mean.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - YPPH 5y ago
    The first paragraph is true, but I had to click on the link to discover that. I guess I'm just a bit peeved at the implicit presumption everyone uses Gmail, and therefore, that Gmail APIs cover the field, and therefore that I can enjoy my inbox.
    - rockwotj 5y ago
      Hey we don't assume everyone uses Gmail. There are advantages to focusing on Gmail to start - it's got a really large market and it was the fastest way to validate our idea. We have plans to integrate with other email providers and eventually be our own provider as well.
      - YPPH 5y ago
        Glad to hear it.
timothylaurent 5y ago
Hmmm can't seem to finish the login flow
- rockwotj 5y ago
  You can reach out to support@shortwave.com with more details about the error you're getting. We'll try to figure out what's going on
lytedev 5y ago
I've been using it for 5 minutes. It's like Google Inbox was brought back from the dead and I mean that in the best possible way. <3 Since we're pitching feature requests, dark mode, please! Looking forward to where Shortwave goes!
- rockwotj 5y ago
  Glad you enjoy it! Dark mode is coming :D It's high up on our list and we're setup for it.
SLWW 5y ago
I would love to use it if i was for more then just gmail. Though fantastic idea all around!
tern 5y ago
I dearly hope you take some ideas from Hey, especially multiple inboxes with individualized behavior. I recently set my Gmail up to work as closely to this as can be achieved and it has completely changed my email life after years of trying different systems and clients. That said, excited to see if the system I set up for myself will port cleanly Shortwave. The bundling feature is clutch and it's the one thing I really miss. Great job, thank you for building this for us, and good luck!
- tern 5y ago
  Just to expand on this, the key feature is thus: - Read emails in the inbox are automatically archived. If you want to see them later, you must set them aside, star, snooze, whatever - Mail that's not from trusted contacts is automatically marked as read and has its own inbox, so you can just glance for anything important, but don't need to manage it at all
bradknowles 5y ago
This is gmail only, yes? Should that not be reflected in the title?
khan-saib 5y ago
sidcool 5y ago
I did not find much about privacy and security on the website.
- jwngr 5y ago
  Check out our security doc [1], Privacy Policy [2], and Terms of Service [3] for this information. [1] https://www.shortwave.com/docs/references/security/ https://www.shortwave.com/docs/references/security/ [2] https://www.shortwave.com/policies/privacy-policy/ https://www.shortwave.com/policies/privacy-policy/ [3] https://www.shortwave.com/policies/terms-of-service/ https://www.shortwave.com/policies/terms-of-service/
xenodium 5y ago
The email space is always interesting to me. I love seeing new ways of tackling the stream. About 4 years ago I found a personal email solution in what I thought would be the unlikeliest of places: Emacs. Emacs + mu4e + mbsync If you’ve already invested in improving your general text-editing experience (your own Emacs config), you can transfer lots of its benefits onto the email space. For example, use yasnippets for quickly writing frequent/typical responses. mu4e search is super snappy on my local imap snapshot (works offline), thus enabling quick batch operations.
minroot 5y ago
nikau 5y ago
Is this a young person thing where they have never seen "create rule" in outlook?
1123581321 5y ago
This looks great. Wish you all the best. I moved on to Hey, which took a page from you all in respect to bundles/views, but I did make the Google Inbox sun my cover art. :) https://i.imgur.com/r83pyqV.jpg https://i.imgur.com/r83pyqV.jpg
awill 5y ago
I get the need to have both a free, and a paid version, but email with only 90 days of history is not a viable free tier. This isn't slack, this is email. I'd love to try it, but it can't work even in the simplest way for me to test.

224 points by mayop100 5y ago

agentdrtran 5y ago

Why no delete button?

mayop100 5y ago
It's coming! Very top of our to-do list!

samwillis 5y ago

Always great to see people innovating on email clients, everyone is different and would have they own best way to manage their email for themselves. So any new option is always good. Out of interest, you have started with Gmail which is understandable but do you have planes to support order email services or even just plain IMAP? I know Gmail is complicated as it doesn't really do IMAP properly and so it better to use their api, so you have to chose one of the other to start. But I hope you have plans to support IMAP.

mayop100 5y ago
We would very much like to support other services in the future. Rather than using IMAP, we integrate with Gmail's APIs from our servers. This allows us to have a new client-server protocol that supports a bunch of new stuff -- like faster real-time updates, better latency compensation and offline handling, bundled inboxes, more interesting triage flows, emoji reactions, presence, etc. The downside of this is obviously that we have to do a customer integration with Gmail to do this. But fortunately it's not too complex, and we intend to support other services in the future. And maybe, in the _long term_, improve the protocols so this integration can be more standard.
- jtsiskin 5y ago
  It’s not a business critique at all; it’s just always a little sad to see awesome tools built that only work for the dominant player in the space. Just another few inches in the moat which makes it harder for an new startup to compete. It may make total sense and be the most rational choice for your business, it’s just unfortunate various systems have made this the case

peakaboo 5y ago

We need this but not for Google. What's the point of a nice inbox when you are getting spied on and sold to advertisers?

stronglikedan 5y ago
One has nothing to do with the other. I would like a nice inbox for my Gmail, despite not caring about being spied on and my info being sold. I'm not alone, judging by the amount of folks that wax nostalgic about Google's Inbox.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bsimpson 5y ago

This layout and color palette are strongly evocative of Inbox. Without knowing anything about your company, I'd presume you're trying to recreate Inbox. Is that intentional?

mayop100 5y ago
Many of us were Inbox users and miss it! We're trying to do more than Inbox did, but we were certainly inspired be it :)

jbverschoor 5y ago

No thank you.. all these apps either want gmail way too many gmail permissions, and/or are hosted. I know the other solution is (currently) IMAP, but that's just fine.. You could use the messageids to create the extra functionality. Some solutions use IMAP folders, which is a pain in the ass. Also... I'm trying to get rid of gmail lol Congrats on launching though, but it's not for me.

TIPSIO 5y ago

Love email apps! Congrats. Honestly, it will be really hard get me to leave Front. I have never used a more productive app for my personal workflow - especially with a team. This is seriously super awesome though. Some misc. feedback/comments: - Front has Team Comments (private and between email messages) that are pure gold for collaborating responses and sharing drafts / notes. - What you all have here with Grouping or "Bundles" is top shelf. Especially the interface and speed of things. I actually tried to get Front to add this in some one off survey two years ago. This allows such a better UX layer of organization than Tags/Folders or Merging emails. Seriously bravo and perfect. - It's not clear if there's a way to manually create a Bundle. For example, I once asked a client to send me 15 photos, they sent it over 15 emails. I would like to manually "Bundle" and merge those emails basically forever. Edit: Apparently you can drag to do this... superb. - Team Inboxes are really useful and I am trying to figure out if Bundles kind of replaces this. - Don't care for Workspaces at all from what I can tell. Maybe my team is too small though. Just don't care for chat that much / use other stuff. - Beyond Bundles, an almost Trello style organization for flow on "Bundles" could be useful as another layer. Attaching a screenshot of how I do it in Front from start of project to end of project life: https://imgur.com/a/eJ73oDF https://imgur.com/a/eJ73oDF - Front is a total mess when it comes to Tags vs Folders and Emojis. What you all have here is really gorgeous. Prop to design team as you can tell this was extremely thoughtful. - Personally don't care for the gif or emoji stuff since email (to me at least) has always been a formal form of communication.

mayop100 5y ago
Thanks for the detailed thoughts! And for the kind words in here :) Re: team features -- we have Workspaces and Channels that let you solve many of the same use cases as Front. Check out our guide here including a quick video intro: https://www.shortwave.com/docs/guides/team/ https://www.shortwave.com/docs/guides/team/ To clarify -- while you can use Channels / Workspaces for general team chat, the main purpose is to help you collaborate on emails, like Front does. Front is more focused on the support use case. We're trying to build something a bit more general purpose, for people like founders, PMs, UX researchers, biz dev, etc to bring visibility to their external emails to their teammates. You can manually group threads with drag-and-drop to create custom bundles today. You can't yet have those filters apply to future emails, but we'd very much like to do this (and a bunch of other powerful bundle features).

dang 5y ago

> When we launched Firebase here 10 years ago, Show HN: Firebase, a scalable real-time backend - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3832877 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3832877 - April 2012 (137 comments) (I'm marking this off topic so it will go to the bottom of the page and hopefully not distract from the new thing.)

josephwegner 5y ago

I'll add in a vote for IMAP support. I am anti-Google in almost all regards. Currently I use FastMail as my email provider, and Mail.app as my client. I pay for FastMail, and similarly I would very gladly pay for a good cross-platform mail client. I'd sign up for a yearly subscription, even! I do recognize that IMAP is not as rich a data source as GMails API, but I'd encourage you to not feel limited by that. I don't mind using hosted email, as long as the revenue source is coming from my wallet, rather than ads. I even had spec'd out building an OSS self-hosted server that ingested email via IMAP and then stored metadata in its own database - this had the benefit of being as rich as GMail APIs, but me as a user still getting to own my data.

mayop100 5y ago
Noted!
billyjobob 5y ago
Fastmail created https://jmap.io/ https://jmap.io/ as an open alternative to the GMail API.
- artdigital 5y ago
  jmap is great, but while it's an 'open alternative', afaik currently fastmail is using it, so adding support for jmap would still not make the client available to more services
lf-non 5y ago
There is mailspring which I have been using for some time - it has a nice modern interface which imho is much better than thunderbird as well as most of the web interfaces of self hosted email. Based on electron though, so ymmv. https://getmailspring.com/ https://getmailspring.com/
- jlkuester7 5y ago
  +1 for MailSpring! It is easily the best desktop email application I have ever used!

bberenberg 5y ago

I think the challenge I have with all of these email apps is always consistent. Gmail is a foundation, I use tools on top of it. Especially once I hop to mobile, do you have a clear strategy for integration with common extensions like HubSpot?

etcet 5y ago

I am one of those Google Inbox refugees and this definitely piques my interest. The pricing does not really make sense for personal user ($9/mo for a email client). Could you elaborate on the free plan 90 day limit? If I snooze an email for 100 days, will I ever see it? Please try to convince me that this limit will not be annoying enough that I should take the risk of linking my Gmail account.

kirillzubovsky 5y ago
I am curious why you think that $9/m does not make sense. Is that too much, or too little, and why for either case?
- etcet 5y ago
  I've spent $0 on email clients the last 20 years I've been using email. At $9/mo, if I used this service, I would have spent $2,160 on an email client. If I imagine a scenario where someone tells me they can turn GMail into Google Inbox, I would consider a one-time $20 a fair price and could maybe be stretched to $60 with some convincing.
mayop100 5y ago
Your email will still come back, and you'll see it in your inbox, but you won't see it in search results. And emails from more than 90 days before you signed up won't be imported.
- dash2 5y ago
  I think the problem is that when you need to search for an email, you really need to know if you got anything or not. And for most of us, we can't wade through the 100s of emails we get a day. So this would really cut me off from my old email, which I think is a showstopper. Otherwise, it looks nice and interesting.

buttocks 5y ago

Feedback: Email is just fine. It is mature and should just be left alone. It is not something that should be reinvented. The next thing should not be email at all. It should be something fundamentally different, not another iteration of email. Seeing some downvote criticism on this comment, let me clarify. I understand the value in working on an established set of federated protocols. Everyone has an email address and this is a very convenient way to start. But it was invented decades ago and has had many kludges bolted on to it to deal with problems or to very slightly improve the user experience. Who's instead going to be more bold and go for a greenfield project to do asynchronous personal communications?

sigmaprimus 5y ago
I wonder if this is true or not, personally I don't use email enough to invest in a product like this ATM but have been kicking the idea of starting a home based business up for a while now and think something like this would fit quite well. Saying Email is just fine or whatever is along the lines of the re-inventing the wheel argument yet every once in a while someone does exactly that and the world is a better place for it! *Edit* The one thing that makes me a bit nervous is signing up with my google account, I wish there was more information on the security behind doing this, in other words am I handing the keys to the kingdom over to a 3rd party by doing this? Is my google account subject to any vulnerabilities this app may or may not have? These questions make me reluctant to "Sign Up" especially for a trial.
jlkuester7 5y ago
I don't get the down-votes on this comment either. (Other then maybe HN is not really the place where folks like to "leave things alone...".) Email is a fact of life and it is not going anywhere, but in general I would prefer communicating over the Matrix protocol. There is plenty of innovation and development still needed in the messaging space, but continuing to view email as the core technology to build on top of is unnecessarily limiting. (Note that this is not a criticism of the Shortwave team as we all need great email clients! I am just concurring that there are protocols that are fundamentally better than email...)
networkimprov 5y ago

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

From the article: > Inbox Zero might be impractical every day, but Inbox Organized happens without breaking a sweat. My experience is the absolute opposite. Organising mails is a strange game, and the only winning move is not to play. I get the information out of the emails as soon as I can, and put it into a system that is actually manageable. GTD had it right from the start. Thank you David Allen. You want harsh feedback ? I'll never pay for your system, because it would lead to more work for me on the long run, not less. Emails are not todo list: todo list are mostly signal, while emails are mostly noise. Your system organize noise, and automatically. This has no value to me. But you could build a system that I actually need. An inbox that I would enjoy. Indeed, I don't need a system that help me organise my various sources of informations and tasks. I have so many of them that would be terrible even if it worked, anyway. Managing 20 organized systems in parallel is hell. I need systems that make it easy to extract the relevant informations from them, and put the result in one central organized place for action, and another one for archive. A system that filters noise, and get me in control. That's it. Eventually, my life is just that: being, doing and knowing. I don't need a system for the first. I don't want more than 2 systems for the 2 last.

jdauriemma 5y ago
> Organising mails is a strange game, and the only winning move is not to play. I laughed out loud at this, because you are 100% correct.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  How about a nice game of chess?
  - alberth 5y ago
    Love the War Games reference. https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/5d7f5bc3-4ceb-4d18-87f7-a146f9cb043f https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/5d7f5bc3-4ceb-4d18-87f7-a146f9c...
- xyst 5y ago
  So true. I found that if an issue is really important, then they will find a way to contact you or it resolves automatically. If I really need to get a context, I'll search for the recipient's name and get instant context on the "issue". My solution is just to never delete any e-mails. Inbox zero is a complete waste of time for me.

smallerfish 5y ago

I realize building on gmail gives you an acquisition audience :) and also that hosting your own email infrastructure is hard, but I think it'd be a far more compelling offering if this was standalone. Google have created the opportunity by cutting the free tier for grandfathered plans - lots of people are looking for alternatives to gmail. In all honesty I'll probably pay $6/mo to gmail for now, but I'm unlikely to stick with them long term. Come up with a compelling standalone platform that's better than Hey or Fastmail and I'll be interested.

owaislone 5y ago
It doesn't have to be one or the other. It can start with Gmail and later offer a hosted solution as well.

gab007 5y ago

Not for me, but.. A honest question - now, when G suite legacy free edition is closing down, here's a chance to offer a service that's not "piggy-backing" on gmail (or any other provider). You could "re-create Inbox" by providing email hosting with same/similar features - already lined up on your page.

martin-adams 5y ago
Wouldn't that be a huge effort though, as you'd have to essentially implement deliverability and spam all from scratch, all while trying to convince gmail users to switch. I tried Hey and found that it just wasn't going to work for me as they wanted to 'own' my email.
- creeble 5y ago
  Interesting, can you expand on why Hey 'owned' your email? I guess no access outside their app?
  - austhrow743 5y ago
    For a long while Hey didn’t support personal domains. Had to use @hey.com
  - thunderrabbit 5y ago
    And Hey explicitly doesn't support IMAP

ocdtrekkie 5y ago

It seems like an absolutely critical flaw to build a business entirely dependent on another company's proprietary service, which also is technically a competitor.

rockwotj 5y ago
Shortwaver here! There are a number of other companies that have started out exclusively on Gmail like us. It's also a risk to stand up a new SMTP service while trying to stay off SMTP blacklists, greylists, and keeping mail out of spam filters. Building on Gmail has allowed us to prove out our product market fit more quickly without spending as much time on getting these deliverability issues solved. However, in the future we'd love to have our own SMTP service as an option in addition to Gmail.

mosselman 5y ago

I am trying this out and I like the grouping and 'marking is done' feature. To be honest, you can't do much worse than the default gmail interface and ui, there is so much low hanging fruit there. What I liked less is the tiny print and tiny UI elements of shortwave in general. I 'solved' this by zooming in a lot, but in general it is hard to see at a glance who e-mails are from, which seems like a pretty important thing. The focus of the design seems to be about being pretty, not being functional as much as I'd have liked. Again, better than gmail in aesthetics, but the typography could use some attention.

owaislone 5y ago

The product looks great. One question: does it sync everything to shortwave servers? If I download the desktop app, will everything still be synced to the servers? I'd be fine with most of my email being copied by a service like this but thinking of emails like OTPs, account resets, bank/credit card and social security authorizations makes me a bit too uncomfortable. I wish this had a denylist of some sort to never some sync mail.

mayop100 5y ago
Good question. Yes, we do sync your mail to our servers. We need to do this to provide many of the features we have. We are taking security very seriously and are doing everything we can to dot our i's and cross our t's. Our engineering team is ex-Google / ex-Firebase engineers with lots of experience building high security, high reliability data systems at Google.
- owaislone 5y ago
  Just tried it and have a bug report: back button is completely broken. I opened a category/group then openened an email, clicked mouse side button (which is bound to back button of browser) and it took me to a completely random email thread. No matter how many times I try it, it takes me back to the same thread. I never opened the thread before I was taken there by the back button.
- owaislone 5y ago
  Can I request a feature? I'd love Shortwave to ignore a specific folder or label in Gmail. I can then label stuff I deem extra sensitive and it would never leave Gmail. This would give a lot of people peace of mind when trying Shortwave.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

o_____________o 5y ago

Always eager to try new mail clients. when is multi-account support landing?

rockwotj 5y ago
Shortwaver here - we'd love you have you give Shortwave a try! We already support multi-account for our iOS app. We would love to bring this to the web/PWA soon!

groby_b 5y ago

I'll be blunt: Anything that promises me a "more enjoyable" inbox, and then advertises with cat pictures and what-do-we-do-for-lunch threads is missing the mark for me. I don't want more fluff in my inbox. I especially don't want anything that helps people "email faster". It's not productive, it just makes more noise. E-mail is a medium for half-baked thoughts quickly dashed off to put them on somebody else's plate. Find a way to reduce e-mail, to help people write more well thought out messages, and I'll be absolutely delighted.

mayop100 5y ago
Keep in mind that the alternative to sending an email is not sending nothing... it's usually to send a text, or a Slack message, or something else that is even less thought through. We try to consolidate all of your communications in one place and give you the tools to write thoughtful things. Don't be confused by the fun examples. Everyone likes cats (those are my actual cats) so we put them in the post, but you certainly can send more important emails :)
- groby_b 5y ago
  I didn't say it was an easy problem to solve. Any hypothetical fix to the dumpster fire that is my inbox would need to increase both friction of sending in the first place and the value of using the tool anyways. And so, no, I'm not confused by the fun examples. I'm fairly clear that they're actively detrimental to me. (I may just not be your audience)
1123581321 5y ago
You sound confused by the examples which are there to show the interface. You can write anything you want in an email message and send as few of them as you want. Anyone who knows they are looking at an email app's landing page will understand that the compose fields are freeform.

BasilPH 5y ago

I would be really interested in this if it had a focus mode, that hides e-mails and delivers them to me in batches. I loved Tempo[1], but unfortunately they ran out of money, which shows how tough this space is. [1]: https://www.yourtempo.co https://www.yourtempo.co

rockwotj 5y ago
Shortwaver here! We've had a few former tempo users switch over to Shortwave and are enjoying the product. We have a few features with bundles that we really want to build that would allow you to replicate a Tempo like workflow of triaging your email in batches.

lucb1e 5y ago

Just as one data point, this looks great but there is no way I could use a web mail client for security reasons (as a security consultant, we use PGP a lot and need a local email provider). In the comments I see it only works with Google servers to boot. I'm not sure if this will ever be for me as well, but I'd love something like paying a small fee for a version of Thunderbird with one or more of these features patched in.

jwngr 5y ago
Shortwave cofounder here. We totally get that. Gmail is just the start for us. We plan to support more providers in the future and even become our own provider long-term. Read more about our company mission on our blog [1]. [1] https://www.shortwave.com/blog/future-of-messaging/ https://www.shortwave.com/blog/future-of-messaging/

dudus 5y ago

I must say I loved it. In 10min I cleared my inbox which I was postponing for a few weeks. I actually love that this is tied to Gmail. The integration means I can move back at any time by just deleting my shortwave account so it's very low risk for me. Also it's top notch, it imported all my aliases and signatures.

rockwotj 5y ago
Thank you for the kind words!

fareesh 5y ago

People have more than 1 unread email? In the regular inbox? really?

brandonmenc 5y ago
My inboxes are all in the 100,000s of messages. I have a few broad search filters (example, at work: internal email vs outside email.) I star or bookmark things I need to come back to (and then un-star them afterwards.) I use text search to find everything else. I treat it like a giant single chat history. I have never not been able to find an email when I need to, and I never miss a message. Life is too short to waste time trying to maintain "inbox zero."
pmontra 5y ago
My email goes through K9 on Android first (5.6, the next version broke this workflow and despised about half of its users. Look for k9 overview screen to appreciate the drama and look at the distribution of the stars of the app.) I use K9 to look at the titles of the messages I get on my POP3 accounts. I don't remove the messages from the servers. I disable notifications and polling. I have to manually check my accounts. This is not to be distracted. Really urgent matters ring my phone. Customers reach me on slack (only on desktop.) IMs are for real time communication. Email is for low priority communication. I check it a few times per day, less than five. I read immediately the important messages and I reply from there, automatically BCC to me. I delete the cruft (the notifications I don't have to archive, invites to events I won't go to, etc.) For many messages the title is the only important signal. Later on, not every day, I download mail on my laptop with Thunderbird. This deletes email from the POP3 servers so it makes it unavailable to the phone. Messages are organized into a few hundred of folders, either by sender or project. Filters do it (create it once, use forever.) This means that I already read the email, at least its title, and I rarely have to read it again on the computer. I got thousands of unread messages there and I have read only the title of many of them, only on the phone. I've got messages dating back to 1994. Of course I'm an outlier (but consider how many people want the old K9 back) and of course predicting how people use stuff is very hard. It would be nice to have an IMAP server over my Thunderbird folder to look at every message from my phone. It's been 10 years since I told me that maybe I should self host one and I never did it, so it's probably not very important though.

edf13 5y ago

Why do we need/want inbox zero? Isn’t that a false promise of modern life? Inbox zero isn’t possible or even necessary

ssss11 5y ago
Yeah I’ve given up on inbox zero. Inbox is my filing cabinet and that just works.
dmd 5y ago
I fail to hit zero fewer than three times a month. It's absolutely possible.
jwngr 5y ago
"Inbox Zero" is 100% not the goal with Shortwave and you won't see it in our marketing. Not to be too cheeky, but "Inbox Organized" is the goal. We want to help you treat your inbox like the to-do list that it is, not necessarily smash every email that enters your inbox. Read more about our workflow in our docs. [1] [1] https://www.shortwave.com/docs/guides/101/ https://www.shortwave.com/docs/guides/101/
brimble 5y ago
I've found it's both achievable and a worthwhile way to operate if and only if nearly all of your emails come from humans, and not very many of them. As soon as transactional emails and marketing mailer scripts start to take over, or long-running CC noise, it's hopeless and fighting it's not worth the time. Forget about it and rely on search. Maybe auto-categorize some senders you want to break through the noise, but anything past that isn't a good use of time (though it may be satisfying, which is enough justification if you're into that kind of thing) Failing that, skimming the inbox for important messages you missed then hitting archive-all at the end of the day can do it, but it's sort-of cheating and I'm not sure how valuable it is. Periodically auto-archiving anything older than X hours can be nice, but won't (often) get you to Inbox Zero.
- BeetleB 5y ago
  > As soon as transactional emails and marketing mailer scripts start to take over, or long-running CC noise, it's hopeless and fighting it's not worth the time. Forget about it and rely on search. The alternative, which works very well for me, is to have a whitelist and only allow that to hit your inbox. Then allow humans to get on to your whitelist: http://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2018/Sep/solving-my-email-problem/ http://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2018/Sep/solving-my-email-proble... It's trivial to filter out the noise, because by default it filters everything out. You do a tiny amount of work to whitelist the humans. Inbox Zero definitely works with that setup.

rpadovani 5y ago

> We collect information that alone or in combination with other information in our possession could be used to identify you (“Personal Data”) as follows: > Email Data: we collect your email address and the contents of any emails and messages you draft or receive in our Service, as well as associated metadata (such as the time sent). I understand the technical need, but no thanks, I would prefer some local client. Especially given that: > In certain circumstances we may share the categories of Personal Data described above with the following categories of third parties without further notice to you: [...] > we may share Personal Data with vendors and service providers, including providers of hosting services, payment processors, email communication software and email newsletter services, customer relationship management and customer support services, and web analytics services. So you (could) share my (business) emails with more or less everybody in the world? Hard pass.

mayop100 5y ago
[Founder & CEO here] We will never sell your data, track you, or advertise to you. We only share this information as necessary to provide the service (for example, by storing it on Google Cloud Platform).
- e12e 5y ago
  You won't - but you cannot meaningfully guarantee you will never sell the company?
- shanxS 5y ago
  Is it possible to store the data, extracted from my data, your service needs in my Google Cloud somewhere or will it expose your secret sauce?
- chrisjj 5y ago
  "We only share this information as necessary to provide the service" That statement would be reassuring... but for the fact it fails to accord with your privacy policy, clause 1.
deleted 5y ago
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Hard_Space 5y ago

For me the killer feature would be to entirely withhold incoming mail from specified email addresses or email domains until weekday working hours. No bolded 'pending' folder, no indication that you're being communicated with by business concerns in your leisure time...I'd pay an extra fee every year just for that one feature.

jwngr 5y ago
Agreed! This is definitely on our list and we've got big plans here. Added your +1 to our internal task tracking this feature :)
ehaughee 5y ago
Check out https://www.hey.com/ https://www.hey.com/. I've found once I categorized the majority of my regular senders to either go to paper trail or feed, I get so little actual mail. Then when I want to go see my feed for Patagonia's latest marketing mail, I can. No number says how many are there, nothing is bold. Just a click or two and I'm looking at my feed. It can even auto-delete after 30 days if you want. Despite the fact that it may sound like it, I am not affiliated with Hey, just a happy user.
thesuitonym 5y ago
It seems so crazy to me that no major mail app has figured this out. Why can't I mute my work email after work hours?
- illnewsthat 5y ago
  You can do that in Outlook. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/manage-your-notifications-in-outlook-mobile-d3b5a22b-919c-4d30-a26f-ae9a0a78ba90 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/manage-your-notif...
BeetleB 5y ago
I use notmuch for my email workflow. It has Python APIs. This is trivial to do with it. The downside is that it's for PCs, not phones. I suppose one could hack a mail server around its tags so you could use it via the phone as well. Never thought about it... https://notmuchmail.org/ https://notmuchmail.org/

rabscuttler 5y ago

This looks great, congrats - it’s great to see innovation and creativity in the email space. I’ve just got through my first week with Superhuman, which I’ve found really productive, particularly the keyboard shortcuts. Your marketing copy seemed to make a few references to that product if I’m not mistaken. Aside from the price ($30/m for Superhuman vs $9/m for Shortwave) would you save me the trouble and outline what you see as key differentiators? It seems like you’re targeting enterprise / teams which looks great for a work account but less useful for a personal one.

jwngr 5y ago
Thanks! Our keyboard shortcuts are pretty extensive too [1]. Let us know if there's a shortcut missing that you'd like to see! Beyond price, there are a handful of examples [2], but I'll focus on two big things that set Shortwave apart: (1) An opinionated triage flow. Bundles group together related senders to make your inbox more scannable, while our triage actions (Pin / Snooze / Done) and drag 'n drop allow you to treat your inbox like the to-do list that it is. [3] We lean into the fact that inbox zero is not a realistic goal for many email users. (2) Team features. We bring Slack-like channels into your email inbox and give you the notification controls to make that possible. [4] Shortwave eliminates the boundary between your team and the rest of the world. And things like emoji reactions, mentions, and a chat-like interface make it feel unlike any email client you've used before. [1] https://www.shortwave.com/docs/references/shortcuts/ https://www.shortwave.com/docs/references/shortcuts/ [2] https://www.shortwave.com/features/ https://www.shortwave.com/features/ [3] https://www.shortwave.com/docs/guides/101/ https://www.shortwave.com/docs/guides/101/ [4] https://www.shortwave.com/docs/guides/team/ https://www.shortwave.com/docs/guides/team/

derekzhouzhen 5y ago

Neat. However, is Gmail backing this? Otherwise, Gmail could mess it up badly any time, right?

scrozier 5y ago

I know that people use their inboxes as to-do lists, but I no of no one who likes it or does it well. Use a plain ol' email account and a decent to-do list. I've been doing it for years and get to inbox zero daily. Feels so good. :-) Putting lipstick on the email/to-do list pig is a step in the wrong direction.

mcs_ 5y ago

Congratulations on the release!!! Do you support/plan to support personal certificates or PGP somehow? It will be fantastic to bring those functionalities to the mainstream.

rockwotj 5y ago
We'd love to better support PGP and multipart/encrypted emails - we have been focusing on nailing our UX and our client experience. But we have grand plans[1] to improve the underlying protocol, and part of that is making e2e encryption the default experience. [1]: https://www.shortwave.com/blog/future-of-messaging/ https://www.shortwave.com/blog/future-of-messaging/

haolez 5y ago

By looking at the screenshot, I can see that it's more complex than Hey, which is the service I'm currently using and am very happy with. I hope this data point helps, somehow. Good luck!

nfkx120 5y ago

smoyer 5y ago

I'm in the process of leaving Google ... I'd love desktop and mobile clients that work with my email servers via IMAP and SMTP.

rockwotj 5y ago
We'd love to build IMAP & SMTP integration into Shortwave! We'll get to it :)

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YPPH 5y ago

I note the tagline says "Enjoy your inbox". This is liable to create the impression the service is platform-neutral, but it is not. It relies solely on the Gmail API? I don't use Gmail, so your product doesn't work for me. A simple way to fix this is to adjust the title to the more accurate, "Enjoy your Gmail inbox", thereby enabling us to determine whether it is usable or not. In the long run, I hope you consider platform-neutral JMAP support once it has matured.

crossroadsguy 5y ago
To be fair that's literally the 2nd line on the landing page: "Email smarter & faster with a reinvented experience for your Gmail", with the first line having an underlined "Enjoy" - I believe to double convince the future users. On the other hand it definitely looks like another snake oil email client in a long list of snake oil email clients. My another guess is (and I maybe wrong) - it is entirely electron or web based - the apps I mean.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- YPPH 5y ago
  The first paragraph is true, but I had to click on the link to discover that. I guess I'm just a bit peeved at the implicit presumption everyone uses Gmail, and therefore, that Gmail APIs cover the field, and therefore that I can enjoy my inbox.
  - rockwotj 5y ago
    Hey we don't assume everyone uses Gmail. There are advantages to focusing on Gmail to start - it's got a really large market and it was the fastest way to validate our idea. We have plans to integrate with other email providers and eventually be our own provider as well.
    - YPPH 5y ago
      Glad to hear it.

timothylaurent 5y ago

Hmmm can't seem to finish the login flow

rockwotj 5y ago
You can reach out to support@shortwave.com with more details about the error you're getting. We'll try to figure out what's going on

lytedev 5y ago

I've been using it for 5 minutes. It's like Google Inbox was brought back from the dead and I mean that in the best possible way. <3 Since we're pitching feature requests, dark mode, please! Looking forward to where Shortwave goes!

rockwotj 5y ago
Glad you enjoy it! Dark mode is coming :D It's high up on our list and we're setup for it.

SLWW 5y ago

I would love to use it if i was for more then just gmail. Though fantastic idea all around!

tern 5y ago

I dearly hope you take some ideas from Hey, especially multiple inboxes with individualized behavior. I recently set my Gmail up to work as closely to this as can be achieved and it has completely changed my email life after years of trying different systems and clients. That said, excited to see if the system I set up for myself will port cleanly Shortwave. The bundling feature is clutch and it's the one thing I really miss. Great job, thank you for building this for us, and good luck!

tern 5y ago
Just to expand on this, the key feature is thus: - Read emails in the inbox are automatically archived. If you want to see them later, you must set them aside, star, snooze, whatever - Mail that's not from trusted contacts is automatically marked as read and has its own inbox, so you can just glance for anything important, but don't need to manage it at all

bradknowles 5y ago

This is gmail only, yes? Should that not be reflected in the title?

khan-saib 5y ago

sidcool 5y ago

I did not find much about privacy and security on the website.

jwngr 5y ago
Check out our security doc [1], Privacy Policy [2], and Terms of Service [3] for this information. [1] https://www.shortwave.com/docs/references/security/ https://www.shortwave.com/docs/references/security/ [2] https://www.shortwave.com/policies/privacy-policy/ https://www.shortwave.com/policies/privacy-policy/ [3] https://www.shortwave.com/policies/terms-of-service/ https://www.shortwave.com/policies/terms-of-service/

xenodium 5y ago

The email space is always interesting to me. I love seeing new ways of tackling the stream. About 4 years ago I found a personal email solution in what I thought would be the unlikeliest of places: Emacs. Emacs + mu4e + mbsync If you’ve already invested in improving your general text-editing experience (your own Emacs config), you can transfer lots of its benefits onto the email space. For example, use yasnippets for quickly writing frequent/typical responses. mu4e search is super snappy on my local imap snapshot (works offline), thus enabling quick batch operations.

minroot 5y ago

nikau 5y ago

Is this a young person thing where they have never seen "create rule" in outlook?

1123581321 5y ago

This looks great. Wish you all the best. I moved on to Hey, which took a page from you all in respect to bundles/views, but I did make the Google Inbox sun my cover art. :) https://i.imgur.com/r83pyqV.jpg https://i.imgur.com/r83pyqV.jpg

awill 5y ago

I get the need to have both a free, and a paid version, but email with only 90 days of history is not a viable free tier. This isn't slack, this is email. I'd love to try it, but it can't work even in the simplest way for me to test.