Collaborate with your team

Shortwave is an AI-native email app designed to help teams collaborate and get things done right from their inboxes. This guide covers how to create a team in Shortwave and collaborate on emails in real-time by sharing live threads, setting assignees, and using AI to streamline your workflows. With real-world examples and step-by-step instructions, you'll learn how to transform your single-player inbox into a centralized hub for team collaboration and communication.

Create & invite your team

The first step to collaborating with your colleagues and sharing AI features in Shortwave is to create a new team. We recommend creating a single team for your entire organization, as this will enable organization-wide collaboration and allow you to pay for everyone with a single company credit card. You can create a team from your settings.

Once you’ve created a team, invite your coworkers to start using team features. You can invite folks at any time via Settings > Members & Billing > + Invite another person. Inviting teammates will send each person an email with a link to join your team in Shortwave.

When sending invites, you can choose each team member’s role to control who has access to what:

• Collaborators: can create, join, and participate in channels
• Admins: can manage billing, team invites, and sharing permissions
• Owner: can delete or transfer ownership of a team

Teammate roles can be changed at any time by Owners and Admins via Settings > Members & Billing.

Comment on emails privately

Team comments in Shortwave let you discuss emails privately with your team, so you can plan how to respond together, and easily keep all the relevant people in the loop. This ensures everyone stays informed and can contribute to relevant conversations without being direct recipients of the email thread.

When you post a comment it will automatically notify teammates who have been involved in the thread (either via email or comments) by pushing the thread to the top of their inbox and sending them a push notification. When other people are commenting, you’ll also see real-time typing indicators, so you can coordinate and avoid stepping on each other’s toes.

If you want to loop in someone else on your team, all you have to do is @mention them in the comment (i.e. @Marcus), and they’ll be notified as well.

Share live email threads & read statuses

When you  @mention your teammate, the entire thread will be shared with them live. They’ll be able to see both historic messages as well as new messages automatically when they arrive. You can also share threads with teammates manually using the Share button at the top of every thread, or by using the keyboard shortcut Cmd Shift S. From the modal that appears you can choose to share with a specific person, group, or even your entire team.

Shared threads look the same to everyone. They automatically include all attachments from the entire thread, and they have proper formatting, inline images, and recipient information from the entire email chain, rather than compressing it all into messy quoted text at the bottom of the email.

Sharing an email also shares read statuses with your team if you have them enabled. This means teammates on shared threads can view email opens, even if they weren't a participant on the thread. Shared read statuses help your team stay in the loop, follow up at the right time, and collaborate more effectively.

If you would like to stop sharing thread updates, you can remove teammates from the shared thread by clicking the Share button at the top of the thread and deselecting them.

With shared threads, you don’t have to constantly forward emails or paste screenshots of them into Slack when you need input from your team. Both your external emails and internal discussions about those emails can happen in the same place.

Link to shared threads from your SaaS tools

Every shared thread comes with a secure link that lets you easily reference that thread from your other SaaS tools. To get the link, just click 🔗 Copy link in the Share modal, or press Cmd C anytime the thread is focused.  Anyone who has access to the thread already (such as anyone on your team you’ve shared the thread with) will be able to follow that link and view the thread.

Assign emails to teammates

To make sure no replies or action items slip through the cracks, Shortwave lets you assign an email to anyone on your team. When the email is assigned, it will be pushed automatically to a special section at the top of the assignee’s inbox and they will be push notified.

When the assignee later marks the thread done, that done status will be visible to everyone on the team as a small checkmark on top of their avatar at the top of the thread. This lets everyone stay on the same page about what’s done and what still needs to happen.

Build an email archive for your team with shared labels

You can turn your historical emails into an accessible email archive for your team by using shared labels. Any team Owner or Admin can create new shared labels across your org via Settings > Team collaboration > Shared labels.

At Shortwave, some of our team’s shared labels include: Support cases Shared love and Sales leads. These shared labels work just like normal labels in Shortwave and are supported by features like Inbox splits, bundles, delivery schedules, searches, and more.

Once a shared label is applied to an email, it instantly becomes discoverable to teammates on that label via search. It also becomes accessible by their AI Assistant. This means your AI Assistant can tap into your entire team’s collective email history to provide smarter answers.

Create AI-powered templates for common emails

Shortwave’s AI Snippets are predefined templates that let you write common emails faster so you can respond to customers in record time while saving your team a lot of work too. You can add new AI Snippets to your team’s library via Settings > Team AI assistant > AI Snippets. Inserting them into your draft is easy: just click the Insert snippet button at the bottom of your draft input, press Cmd ; or access them using /slash commands by typing / in the compose box.

When creating new snippets, you also have the option of enabling the AI Assistant to help you fill them in. You just need to add instructions using {AI placeholders} in your snippet and the AI will automatically fill them out. Here’s an example of a snippet that uses AI instructions to look up information from your email history and calendar:

CC: marcus@catco.com

Hi {recipient's first name},

{insert a one sentence intro that calls back to the last
email I had with the recipient. Search my email as needed}

Thanks for reaching out about 1:1 training sessions for
your team. CC-ing my colleague Marcus who will help
coordinate the training topics.

Here are some times I'm free for a call:

{list 3 times I'm available next week for a 30-min call as
bullet points, with preferences for morning availability}

Marcus and I are here if you have any questions.

— {my name}

You can use the full power of the AI Assistant when filling in these templates, including the ability to search your email for information, check your calendar for availability, or insert information from general knowledge. Sharing these AI Snippets with your org helps everyone work smarter and faster with a team-wide library of common email templates.

Streamline workflows with team AI Automations

Team AI Automations let you share existing workflows, best practices, and important information across your team. You can create one-click actions via Settings > Team AI assistant > Shared custom AI quick actions and streamline your most common AI Assistant commands. To run the AI Automation, all you have to do is click on the action from the bottom right of the AI Assistant, or press Cmd ’ from anywhere in the app.

By investing some time upfront to build a shared list of custom AI Automations you can help your team save even more time while delivering consistently high-quality work.

Send team-wide emails using channels

Shortwave channels are like dedicated mailing lists that let you easily email all teammates relevant to a particular topic. For those who have used Slack and Microsoft Teams channels before, Shortwave channels should feel familiar. Although channels may look and feel like chat, it’s all just email.

To use a channel, simply start a new email draft and type the channel name into the To field. When you send the email, all members of the channel will receive it. In addition, in the future, those messages will be available to future team members who join that channel as well.

If you're not a member of any channels — create or join some from the Team collaboration settings page. Any new channel you create will also be available for your teammates to join. Here at Shortwave, we use channels like: 📢 Shortwave team 💾 Engineering 🚢 Shipped it and 🩷 User love.

In addition to channels, using Shortwave with your team also unlocks more Shortwave-specific features like typing indicators, emoji reactions, and mentions, making it easy to collaborate with your teammates in real-time. Shortwave supports a few different types of mentions to help get the attention of others or quickly modify who is on a thread without your hands leaving your keyboard.

• @mentions add and share an email thread with a person, as well as notify teammates with push notifications (this respects do-not-disturb settings)
• +mentions add a person or channel to an email thread
• -mentions remove a person or channel from an email thread
• #mentions link to a person or channel so you can easily share contact info

Mentions work in any email draft – not just ones addressed to channels. It's just like adding or removing people from the To, Cc, and Bcc fields, but with shorthand directly in your message.

If you have additional questions about using Shortwave with your team, please contact sales@shortwave.com.