Show HN: Shortwave: Enjoy Your Inbox (shortwave.com)

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.

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.

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 :)

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/

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).

Love this. I wrote a draft with some of this but thought it wasn't substantive so deleted..

The gist to me is this product has been done before and doesn't seem to solve much or save much time IMHO. Hey.com seems better and does help with some personal email problems (spam, social and marketing emails)

This product seems like it wants to be a business tool without a lot of those core features.

You mention a lot of great inter organizational tools.

Front is awesome I've built plugins for it for our clients currently working on one right now. They have done multi inbox, multi agent/user really well.

But to me the $ would be for business use. If this product can bring in say salesforce data or purchase data as context in an email for example, that's where the money would be IMHO.

Like if you are a web store, someone replies to their receipt email they want a refund/exchange. The UI presents your companies' process to do that in one or two clicks, since it knows the email address & can parse the email for an order #.

Maybe for employee to employee too but seems like not much money there. IDK maybe it can integrate and figure out git integrations as an example of parsing email content and providing context for replying.

P.s. this probably doesn't matter much at all maybe I'm a jerk for writing it but that video voice over recording is awful it sounds like it was done on an employees laptop. Especially for - it sounds like - people with a big exit, connections to capital. Maybe on purpose though! because I also hate the over produced bell xylophone bopping along hippy hoppy modern vector graphic people demo videos too lol

Noted!

Fastmail created https://jmap.io/ as an open alternative to the GMail API.

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/

It took me a few tries to move off of Gmail onto FastMail and I still miss the Gmail iPhone app. I haven't found anything I prefer.

I suspect I'm not the only one and that a good desktop + mobile app would increase the number of people migrating away from Google. I frankly never would've seen myself use a third party client while I was still on Gmail.

Does mail.app notify you as quickly as the Fastmail app does?

I found mail on both iOS and Mac to be significantly slower. Made me suspect it wasn’t receiving push notifications but rather pulling them entry so often even though my settings were supposed to allow push.

> I don't mind using hosted email, as long as the revenue source is coming from my wallet, rather than ads.

Serious question: Do premium Gmail accounts (using your own domain) serve ads and mine your data?

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.

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?

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.

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...)

Here are a few fundamentally different async protocols in development which could challenge SMTP:

DIME - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Mail_Alliance

Math Mesh - https://mathmesh.com

TMTP - https://mnmnotmail.org (my work)

Email is a couple of related but separable things.

One of those things is transport and all that it entails (delivery, storage, addressing, etc.) Another is a particular kind of messaging.

One can use the transport for other kinds of messaging.

> 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.

It’s a modern Sysyphus scenario. I could do it, if I did nothing else, and it would not contribute to my doing any useful work and I’d be at the bottom of the hill tomorrow morning.

I’ve been keeping my inbox perfectly organized for years, and it is my todo list.

If I want to add an item that didn’t originate from a third-party email, I email myself.

A pin/star means it’s waiting for me to be done. No pin/star means it came in but I haven’t assessed it yet, these tend to be on top.

I get email notices for voicemail so it’s a central funnel.

I extensively use filters/labels to keep automated mail out of my main inbox. I aggressively unsubscribe from anything non-essential.

Everyone has their own preferences but this works great for me.

I've been using Shortwave in Alpha for about five months and I think you're reacting far too strongly to one line in the blog post. The product does a bunch of things that encourage an Inbox-zero workflow. Emails are organized as a to-do list, and the archive feature is way more prominent than in Gmail, so the most natural workflow is to go down your inbox and check things off. Most of the organization described happens automatically. And the organization helps getting to zero - all of the confluence notifications I get, for instance, are grouped in a single thread and I can scan and archive them quickly.

I get to inbox zero 2-3 times a week, and that wasn't happening before when I was using the Gmail client.

> 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.

Yes! In my experience Shortwave is better at this than the client I was using previously. I think it actually addresses some of your issues with email.

This is also just a complete misread of the original Inbox Zero talk, and something Merlin Mann complains about every time he tries a new email app that does confetti when you hit "inbox zero". He himself is a deep GTD/David Allen acolyte anyway, but at this point people's misread of what "inbox zero" means is too mainstream and cargo culted.

I couldn't agree less. I've tried so many task and todo systems and ultimately have come to the conclusion that the most effective todo list I've ever had is my email inbox. I pick one up and then fail to fully embrace it because forming new habits can be hard. Email on the other hand, is impossible to avoid, I have to be in it every day. I've yearned for a better way to manage it and I think this product addresses that.

Unfortunately I won't be a customer though because I hate Google and am a happy Fastmail user.

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

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.

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.

It's coming! Very top of our to-do list!

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.

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!

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 :)

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.

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.

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/

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."

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.

Thank you for the kind words!