Migrating from Superhuman

Shortwave is the best Superhuman alternative, offering a snappy, beautifully designed app with the world's smartest AI Assistant. Shortwave's focus on speed, usability, and AI-powered productivity, makes it easier than ever to hit inbox zero while saving you an hour every day.

Switching from Superhuman to Shortwave is easy since Shortwave supports nearly every major feature in Superhuman, has much smarter AI integrations, costs less, and keeps your information syncing seamlessly between the two email apps. This guide tells you how to migrate your Superhuman workflows and email data to Shortwave without missing a beat.

Configure your inbox and devices

Supporting Inbox Splits, familiar keyboard shortcuts, and ways to manage multiple email accounts, Shortwave makes it easy to migrate your inbox triage practice regardless of your Superhuman settings.

Inbox Splits

You can customize your Shortwave experience to match your existing split set-up from Superhuman. Splits are backed by Shortwave’s powerful search infrastructure, so they’re incredibly customizable. You can define Splits based on:

• Importance
• Built-in labels (such as Newsletters, Promotions, Updates, etc.)
• Custom labels
• Specific senders
• Complex search queries

You can configure them in moments by heading to Settings > Splits & Bundles settings on the web. For even more power, you can use Gmail filters or Shortwave’s auto-apply rules to apply a label automatically to emails, and then create a Split based on that label. You can also manually move emails via drag-and-drop that you would like to show up in a specific label Split.

Managing multiple inboxes

Shortwave makes it easy to sign into multiple accounts on each device and quickly switch between them using the keyboard shortcut CTRL 1, 2, 3, etc. On the mobile apps, switching accounts is as simple as swiping your account avatar.

Having separate inboxes for your accounts helps reduce context switching, as checking work emails vs personal emails requires different mental effort and can disrupt your focus when trying to get deep work done. See our guide on how to manage multiple accounts as well as unified inbox workarounds.

Download the desktop & mobile app

While Shortwave works in a web browser, if you’re looking for a dedicated email app to keep pinned to your dock like Superhuman, Shortwave is available on Mac, Windows, Android, and iOS. See our downloads page for instructions on how to install Shortwave on all of your devices.

On the mobile apps, you can also customize your Shortwave swipe actions to best suit your needs and most frequent actions via Settings > General > Swipe actions. From there, you can modify or add new actions on your mobile device.

Use features you’re familiar with

Years of using the same email client comes with muscle memory that's hard to overcome. Luckily, switching from Superhuman to Shortwave means you can keep all of your email habits intact, from using keyboard shortcuts, to writing with AI, to having a dedicated app in your dock, and everything in between.

Keyboard shortcuts

Shortwave supports many of the Superhuman and Gmail keyboard shortcuts you're used to, plus a whole lot more—including shortcuts for thread actions, email formatting, and navigation. Like Superhuman, a blue highlight indicates what thread or section keyboard shortcuts will affect.

To reference Shortwave's primary shortcuts from the app, press ⌘ / (Ctrl / on Windows) to open the help box. You can also read a full list of support keyboard shortcuts in our Shortcuts guide.

Command palette

Shortwave’s command palette replaces Superhuman Command for navigating and taking actions across the app, no matter where you are. Use the shortcut you’re already familiar with: ⌘ K to pull up the command palette and start typing. See our guide for a full list of commands.

AI compose & AI Assistant

Between instant AI replies, improving your drafts with AI, and having a built-in AI Assistant for natural language search, Shortwave ensures that you have the right tool for every situation. Compared to Superhuman AI features, Shortwave’s robust AI Assistant and AI writing tools offer more accurate and personal-sounding results thanks to Shortwave’s custom cutting-edge AI technology.

See our guides for more information on how to get the most out of the AI Assistant and how to write emails using Shortwave’s AI.

Reminders

Similar to Superhuman’s reminders, when sending an email in Shortwave you can choose 🔔Remind me next to the Send button to set a follow-up reminder, just select a time. The email thread will automatically return to your inbox as soon as it gets a response, or when the reminder time is scheduled (whatever comes first). Any pending reminders can be found on the Snoozed page.

Block senders

Like Superhuman’s ability to block senders, you can easily guard your inbox against clutter by blocking unwanted senders and noisy marketing emails. In Shortwave, new senders have a banner at the top of the email thread with a one-click option to block and unsubscribe. Blocked messages will be immediately sent to your trash, keeping your inbox permanently cleaner going forward.

Import your data and settings

Shortwave is built on top of Gmail, which in turn syncs with Superhuman, so we keep your data synced between all platforms:

Labels and filters

Superhuman labels are automatically imported into Shortwave when you sign up, and any changes made to labels in Shortwave are immediately synced back to Superhuman. This means you can take full advantage of Shortwave's auto-apply labels knowing your Superhuman inbox will be kept in the loop.

You can create filters in Gmail to apply labels based on more advanced criteria such as domain, keyword, or recipients.

Note that since Gmail filters sync back to Shortwave, this means that filters causing threads to skip your Superhuman inbox will cause the threads to also skip your Shortwave inbox. Skipped threads can be found in Shortwave via search. But if you want them to always enter your Shortwave inbox, modify your filters from Gmail's filter settings page.

Additionally, changes made to a label in Superhuman (or Gmail), such as creating a new label, or edits to a label's name or color, are synced to Shortwave daily. To force Shortwave to fetch your latest label changes immediately, click the Refresh Gmail data button from Shortwave Settings > Support. Note that this does not apply when adding or removing a label from a message, which will always sync instantly between Superhuman and Shortwave.

Stars

Shortwave syncs starred threads from Superhuman and displays the most recent starred threads at the top of your inbox. You can view all starred threads from the Starred page. Shortwave also gives you control over how stars behave to tailor them to your workflow.

There are 3 main settings:

• Stars at top of inbox - Include an optional "Starred" section at the top of your inbox
• "Starred" section size - If the "Starred" section is enabled, controls how long it is
• Unstar when done - Clear stars when marking threads done

Signatures

Shortwave currently syncs your default Gmail signature. If you have created a custom signature in Superhuman, copy it over to your Gmail signature so that you may apply it to your outgoing emails from Shortwave.

If you opt to enable a signature, you will see a signature icon at the bottom of the compose box. Clicking it will allow you to toggle between including or removing your signature for individual messages.

If you want to modify your signature, you can make edits from your Gmail settings. After doing so, sync these changes to Shortwave immediately via the Refresh Gmail data button from Shortwave Settings > Support.

Aliases

On sign-in, Shortwave syncs any aliases associated with your Gmail account. Just like in Superhuman, you can configure your alias preferences to always reply from your default address, or from the same address the message was sent to via Settings > Compose > Aliases. When sending an email, you can also choose to change the sending alias by clicking the reply arrow in the top left of the compose box.

To update your default address, you'll have to edit your account settings from Gmail.

Keeping everything in sync

In general, both Shortwave and Superhuman sync all of your email with Gmail, so you should see the same emails in both places. However, there are a couple of exceptions when using more advanced features like: snoozed threads, scheduled emails, and drafts.

Snoozed threads in Shortwave are temporarily archived in Superhuman but will reappear in both inboxes when unsnoozed or delivered. Similarly, scheduled messages in Shortwave won't show as scheduled in Superhuman but can be managed via the Sent page in Shortwave. Once the message is sent, it will appear in both apps.