Shortwave just rescued my inbox from the drudgery of Gmail

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge

When it killed its alternative email service, the company promised that many of its ideas would eventually make it to Gmail. Most of the things that made Inbox a success, such as bundles, never did. In the following years, the entire productivity suite has been put into Gmail to make it easier for people to use the rest of the services. It is about to get worse as a major Gmail update is about to be rolled out.

Gmail's evolving interface works for those who are invested in the system, but it doesn't do much to save people from sifting through their messy inboxes every day. It's easy to see why: it still dumps on you a list of emails with no structure beyond an unpredictable set of filters for keeping out promotional messages, and social media updates.

The email apps that offer to fix Gmail's flaws have been disappointing for me. I didn't need many of the features of Spark. Superhuman is an email app that wants to make you feel like you have powers. After years of app hopping, my search for a successor to Gmail's inbox may be coming to an end thanks to a new client called Shortwave.

A group of ex-Googlers, including Andrew Lee, who previously founded and sold Firebase, designed Shortwave. If you have less than three months of email history, Shortwave will not be able to step into Inbox's shoes. It looks and works like it, but it is more than just a clone. It builds upon the effective design choices that powered Inbox with some of its own, and in the two weeks I've spent with it, it has made me far more productive at managing my email.

It doesn't drown me in an onslaught of emails when I fire up Shortwave. The non-essential items, such as updates from social media and automated confirmations like the ones from Amazon, are bundled neatly together, and the threads I labeled previously for, say, a project, are sorted in another by default. This all happens within the same inbox, which allows me to keep an eye on it and prevent junk from piling up.

Image: Shortwave

Most of my inbox is already organized and I don't have to pay attention to many emails. It feels like my work has been cut in half, because I know the messages under bundles can wait, and I can quickly get to the emails that matter without stressing over the unread count.

Shortwave's most striking quality is how it compelled me to rethink how I handle my email inbox. I used to dive into it head-on with no plan and probably missing what was at the bottom.

There is a certain routine to it when I log on. I use thesweep button to archive all the junk in one place. If there are any unread messages in the Favorites section, which houses emails from my most frequently contacted people, I will check to see if I have any updates from my editors.

I can easily sort the rest by priority, pinning the most urgent items to the top of the inbox, and then dropping related emails onto each other to throw them in a new bundle. It takes me a few minutes to answer my emails, and you can do everything with keyboard shortcuts.

Image: Shortwave

I suffer from an anxious tendency to roll over to my phone and check my emails first thing in the morning, but Shortwave's Do Not Disturb mode now holds all emails until later and keeps my email-anxious brain in check. The app allows me to cherry-pick the sort of emails I want to be notified of and frees up my notification panel of junk.

It feels like Shortwave strikes the right balance when it comes to information density. Its interface is large enough that I can see a lot of emails at a time, and it is easy to navigate, unlike Inbox, which was criticized for its low density of text. I like to show when a new recipient is in an email chain or when someone breaks the reply-all into a sub-thread.

I had to trust that Shortwave wouldn't sell or read my emails to bring these conveniences to Gmail. Shortwave makes a convincing case that handing reins to new companies has become harder than ever. Shortwave says it has passed an annual audit that costs third parties over $75,000 and involves stress-testing their security protections, as well as clear policies that don't monetize personal data. It helps its case that its business model is dependent on a premium subscription.

The company that did the audit for Shortwave refused to comment.

Although Shortwave is my default inbox, I still have to return to Gmail every once in a while because it can't schedule emails yet and lacks a few standard folders. The lack of a deletion option has been a letdown. Lee can't comment on when those updates will arrive, but he claims all of these are high on the priority list.

The startup's grander ambitions to replace apps with email could throw a wrench in Shortwave's experience for me. Shortwave allows organizations to create workspace where employees can chat in real-time as they would on a messaging service. All the messages are emails. At the moment, these enterprise tools live in their separate division and don't get in the way, but whether that changes and Shortwave's clean inbox in the same way as Gmail, remains to be seen.

Image: Shortwave

I am skeptical of Shortwave's plan to transform email into the silver bullet for all work communication, but if my inbox is any indication, it can restore a state of calm into your chaotic relationship with emails and patch that Inbox-sized hole in the world.

Shortwave doesn't try to change email, it's simple and practical. All I could think about was why it wasn't brought over to Gmail. Many of its features may seem minor additions to Gmail, but they add up to an email experience that is less frustrating and more functional.