Shortwave Email Review: AI-Powered Inbox Management

What Is Shortwave?

The Shortwave email app is what I like to call an opinionated email client—it has strong ideas about how you should manage your inbox and isn't shy about promoting them. At the heart of this philosophy is the "Shortwave Method," a structured approach to achieving inbox zero that transforms your inbox from a chaotic mess into an organized workspace.

The Shortwave AI email system wants you to approach your inbox the same way a rescue worker approaches a car accident (they use a different metaphor, but I prefer this one): assess everything quickly, handle immediate priorities, and create a clear plan for more complex cases.

This "email triage" methodology breaks down all incoming messages into three categories:

1. Non-actionable items: Newsletters, notifications, and FYI emails that require no response. These should be archived or deleted immediately to reduce clutter.
2. Quick tasks: Messages you can handle in under two minutes, like confirming a meeting time or sharing a requested document. These should be dealt with on the spot.
3. Longer tasks: Emails that need more substantial time and attention, such as detailed proposals or complex questions. These get converted into tracked tasks for later focus.

The secret sauce of the Shortwave Method is its insistence that you complete this triage process before writing detailed responses or doing complex tasks.

In practice, the Shortwave email app implements this system through an intelligent combination of AI assistance and smart organizational tools. When you first open the app, it encourages you to process your entire inbox in a single pass, making quick decisions about each message.

The app's AI features (more about them soon) help streamline this process by automatically bundling similar messages together and suggesting quick actions. The good news is that even if you don't fully embrace the methodology, many of the app's features can still be valuable for general inbox organization.

Inside the Shortwave Email Experience

The Shortwave email app offers apps for all major platforms—iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows. While I've primarily used the Mac version for this review, I've also spent time with the mobile apps, which have earned impressive ratings (4.8 stars on iOS and 4.5 stars on Android) for their thoughtful design and functionality.

The desktop interface features a clean three-panel layout. The left sidebar houses your navigation and folders, the middle panel displays your message list with smart bundles of related emails, and the right panel shows the selected email's content along with AI-powered features. The mobile interface manages to condense this three-panel experience into a format that works smoothly on smaller screens.

My basic email management routine in Shortwave starts with familiar actions—the three-dot menu next to each message offers standard options like move, archive, and delete. But where things get interesting is with the client's more advanced features.

For example, you can use the three-dot menu to "Bundle threads like this," which automatically groups similar emails together. I like this feature for managing newsletters and promotional content—instead of dealing with dozens of individual marketing emails, they get neatly bundled into manageable groups.

One feature that initially excited me was the unsubscribe option. However, I quickly discovered its limitations. Unlike the bulk unsubscribe feature in inbox organizer Clean Email, Shortwave only lets you unsubscribe from one email at a time.

Even more frustrating, I found that some obvious subscription emails don't even show the unsubscribe option—either because the sender didn't include proper unsubscribe headers or due to limitations in Shortwave's unsubscribe detection.

📌 To stop these subscriptions, you'll need to block them as spam manually, or you can use Clean Email, which offers a more effective solution for managing unwanted subscriptions.

For emails that require action but can't be handled immediately, Shortwave offers a to-do system. You can add any email to your todos with just a click, and the implementation is quite flexible.

Want to organize related tasks together? The "Move to another todo" feature lets you group similar items. Once you've completed a task, marking it as "Done" removes it from your active todos while keeping it accessible in your archive.

There's also the snooze feature, which can make a message reappear at a more convenient time. You can quickly pick from a handful of suggested snooze options (tomorrow, this weekend, next week, and so on), or you can easily enter a custom snooze time just by typing something like "4 hours."

Perhaps the most powerful organizational feature is Shortwave's implementation of filters, which they call "Splits." Found in the Settings under "Inbox setup," splits offer a variety of ways to automatically organize your incoming mail. The app comes with several recommended splits out of the box—Starred, Newsletters, Calendar, Promotions, and Updates.

📌 What really impressed me was the attention paid to business users with special notification splits, which can automatically organize emails based on department (Engineering, Design, Product, Sales) or even specific tools (Asana, GitHub, Salesforce).

Closer Look at Shortwave's AI Capabilities

You might have noticed that I've yet to talk about Shortwave's AI email management features, even though they're front and center in most of their marketing materials. That's intentional—I wanted to give these much-hyped capabilities their own dedicated section to really examine if the Shortwave AI email features live up to the promises.

Remember those bundles I talked about in the previous section? Each bundle comes with an AI-powered summary at the top, giving you a quick overview of what's inside without having to open individual messages.

📌 During my testing, these summaries have been surprisingly accurate, though they miss some nuanced details occasionally.

The Shortwave app includes several other AI-powered features that attempt to streamline your email workflow. While composing emails, the app suggests contextual phrases and even complete sentences based on your writing history. It's meant to help you write faster by predicting what you might say next, including real links and facts from your email history.

📌 In practice, I found this feature hit-or-miss—sometimes impressively accurate, other times suggesting completions that felt oddly formal or out of place.

The real star of the show is the Shortwave AI assistant, accessible from any screen with a quick keyboard shortcut or by clicking the sparkle icon. You can think of it as a ChatGPT that's built directly into your email client—but with full access to your email history and calendar.

The assistant can handle a wide range of tasks, from the mundane to the complex:

You can even customize it by changing the AI writing/proofreading prompt and more.

However, I've found myself using these AI capabilities less frequently than I initially expected because many of the features feel slower than just doing things manually.

For example, I can usually draft a quick reply faster than I can explain to the AI how I want it to respond. And while the calendar scheduling features are clever, they often caused me to feel anxiety about whether the AI understood my instructions correctly, creating an urge to double-check the AI assistant's work.

📌 So, at this point, I wouldn't use or recommend the Shortwave app just for its AI features. I personally find it much faster to handle most email tasks manually than to rely on AI assistance that requires constant verification.

But I do admit that some features, particularly thread summaries and natural language search, can be genuinely helpful when used selectively.

AI Features and the Issue of Data Privacy

When any email tool introduces AI capabilities, it immediately raises legitimate privacy concerns. After all, we're talking about giving an AI system access to potentially sensitive personal and business communications. In the case of the Shortwave email app, these concerns are particularly relevant given how deeply AI is integrated into every aspect of the experience.

📌 The good news is that Shortwave explicitly states that your emails are never used to train their AI models.

The system uses a sophisticated approach called Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). When you interact with the AI assistant, it follows a four-step process:

1. Tool Selection: The AI first determines what types of data it needs to answer your query.
2. Data Retrieval: It gathers relevant information from your email history and other sources.
3. Answer Generation: The AI creates a response using the collected context.
4. Post-Processing: The system formats the response and adds relevant citations.

The only issue is that all of Shortwave's AI processing happens in the cloud, which means your email content is processed on third-party servers. While this data is encrypted both in transit and at rest using industry-standard protocols (TLS 1.2+ and AES256 encryption), the cloud-based nature of the service could be a deal-breaker for businesses in regulated industries.

However, for most regular users, this cloud-based processing likely won't be a significant concern. After all, Shortwave only works with Gmail accounts, and Gmail itself is a cloud-based service where your emails are already stored and processed on Google's servers. In this context, Shortwave's cloud processing simply adds another layer of secure cloud infrastructure to an already cloud-based email system.

How Much Does the Shortwave AI Email App Cost?

Shortwave structures its pricing with distinct tiers for individual and business users, with all paid plans available through either monthly or annual billing. Opting for annual billing provides significant savings, typically around 20% compared to monthly payments.

For individual users, there are two options:

1. The free plan provides basic access to the Shortwave email app with some significant limitations. Most notably, emails sent through the free tier include a mandatory "Sent with Shortwave" signature that is impossible to remove. This alone prevents Shortwave from being one of the best free email clients. The free plan also restricts users to just 90 days of searchable email history and offers only basic AI features.
2. The Personal plan ($7/month with annual billing or $8.50/month with monthly billing) removes these limitations and extends searchable history to one year.

For businesses, Shortwave offers three plans:

1. Starting with Pro plan ($14/month annually), which supports up to three team members and provides advanced AI features like personalized writing assistance and predictive autocomplete.
2. The Business tier ($24/month annually) adds features for larger teams, such as read statuses, AI-powered filters, and support for up to 10 team members.
3. At the top end, the Premier plan ($36/month annually) removes all limitations and includes advanced features like unlimited email history search, link tracking, and an activity feed showing when recipients open emails. Premier subscribers also get access to live one-on-one training sessions and enhanced AI capabilities with double the context tokens for more accurate responses.

The pricing structure makes it clear that Shortwave is positioning itself primarily as a business tool, with its most powerful features reserved for team accounts. That said, $7 a month isn't a bad deal for a mail client that can potentially save you many hours every month—depending on how much time you spend in your inbox, of course.

Shortwave Email Review Verdict

After several weeks of testing the Shortwave email app, I've come away with mixed feelings. On the one hand, it's an innovative and thoughtfully designed email software that brings genuinely useful AI capabilities to your inbox. However, there are some significant limitations to consider.

The Gmail-only restriction immediately rules it out for many potential users, but a much bigger problem I have with Shortwave is that the AI features often feel slower than handling tasks manually.

Maybe someone who hasn't been managing electronic messages manually for as long as I have would find more value in AI assistance. For experienced users, the AI often feels like it's adding an extra layer of complexity to simple tasks.

Fortunately, Shortwave is free to try, so there's nothing stopping you from testing it out yourself. Just make sure to also give Clean Email a try – you might find that you don't actually need to switch email clients just to keep your inbox organized.

Who should use Shortwave?

Who should look elsewhere?