Show HN: Shortwave: Enjoy Your Inbox

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

- 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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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!

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

Why no delete button?

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

Why do we need/want inbox zero?

Isn’t that a false promise of modern life? Inbox zero isn’t possible or even necessary

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

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