Recently, Shortwave has been trending throughout the internet. In 2019, Google left several people disappointed when the company shut down Inbox by Gmail (also known as Google Inbox)—an email application that connected to Gmail and organized messages in easy-to-read bundles. Several other email apps and services have implemented similar functionality, but now what might be considered as the closest imitator has arrived.
Shortwave to sort conversations
In a piece of recent news, an application has been launched that will bundle email messages by their conversation or topic. The app, known as Shortwave, looks nearly identical to Inbox and comes with a list of email messages bundled by their conversation or topic. According to the official website, “Threads are automatically categorized and bundled together to keep you organized by default. Want to customize things? Re-organize with drag ‘n drop or use notification settings to control what enters your inbox.”
The application has been launched by a company of the same name, Shortwave, based in San Francisco. Some of the staff previously worked at Google—Shortwave’s CEO Andrew Lee was Firebase’s co-founder, CPO Jacob Wenger and CTO Jonny Dimond were core developers at Firebase, founding designer Ali Berlin Johnson was a senior UX designer at Google, and so on.
Markdown Support
Along with sorting emails, Shortwave also has markdown support when drafting emails, an option to pin important emails/groups to the top of the screen, a snooze feature (just like regular Gmail), and a few other improvements.
However, there are some catches right now—it only connects to Gmail accounts, the desktop version is a website, and the Android app is just a web wrapper. In addition, Shortwave also hopes to completely rebuild the Android app to be a native application, but there’s no telling when that will be ready.
Shortwave is a paid service. It can access the past 90 days of Gmail messages for free, but if a user wants to access older messages, they will need to pay up. The standard plan costs $9 per person per month (Shortwave hopes businesses will be the main customers). Therefore, if an individual wants to relive the golden days of Inbox, it will cost about two-thirds of a Netflix subscription.
