Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Shortwave: Enjoy Your Inbox
I’m thrilled to finally be able to show everyone what we’ve been working on for the last 2 years. We’re re-inventing the email experience to help you email smarter and faster, so you can get more done, and maybe even actually enjoy your inbox. When we launched Firebase here 10 years ago, HN was tough but fair, and I expect no less this time around! I hope you’ll check out what we’ve built and share your feedback. I’ll be around here all day and am happy to answer any questions. Let us know what you think!
Shortwave is an email client designed to streamline inbox management and help users work more efficiently with their messages. It aims to make email faster and more enjoyable through a reimagined interface and… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Shortwave: Enjoy Your Inbox launched in 2022; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1
Shortwave▲299Email smarter & faster with a reinvented Gmail experience
2022 · shortwave.com · its alternatives →
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Zero▲845Hi HN, I’m Nizar, and I’m building Zero (https://0.email) — an AI-powered email client that manages your inbox for you. Email hasn’t changed in decades, even though the way we work has. The average knowledge worker now spends close to 30% of their week on email, constantly reacting, replying, and sorting through noise. It’s become one of the biggest productivity sinks in modern work. At the same time, AI has transformed how we write, plan, and collaborate — yet our inboxes are still stuck in the past. I built Zero to fix that. Zero automatically prioritizes, organizes, and even…
2025 · 0.email · its alternatives →
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Hello Inbox▲283Hey HN, I built an email deliverability SaaS with a RAG system. It's trained on all my knowledge and hundreds of real deliverability use cases from 4+ years experience as an Email Deliverability Specialist on Upwork. It solves a frustration problem a lot of businesses are experiencing. I'm looking for feedback so let me know in the comments.
Aug 2026 · helloinbox.email · its alternatives →
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The ultimate search, analysis, and productivity companion
2024 · shortwave.com · its alternatives →
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shortwave▲106Short-range anonymous messaging (Secret meets Firechat)
2014 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
- 7

Hey it's Andrew - author of https://www.crowdwave.com here! - crowdwave works best on your phone - unless you've got your headset and microphone plugged in to your desktop, in which case desktop works great too. Here's the story: So about six months ago I saw this post on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39910119 https://afterthebeep.tel is really cool - it's an anonymous voicemail box - you call the provided phone the number and leave a message. Blaine - the guy who runs the site (eventually) listens to and approves your message and writes a…
2024 · crowdwave.com · its alternatives →
- 8

Control when emails get delivered to your inbox
2022 · shortwave.com · its alternatives →
- 9
Talanoa▲340Hi HN, I’m a fullstack developer, and honestly, I’ve lost count of how many side projects I’ve worked on over the years. But one idea kept coming back to me: a different kind of email client. It first came to me in 2014: “What if we could handle emails more like conversations?” Every year, I’d revisit this concept in my “Build Notes.” Ten years later, no one had built exactly what I had in mind — so I finally decided to do it myself. That’s how Talanoa was born. I wanted something focused on people, not timelines. I was tired of marking messages as unread just to remember to reply later, or…
20d ago · talanoa.email · its alternatives →
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Hello HN! I wanted to share something we at Good Enough (https://goodenough.us) built over the past year: Jelly! https://letsjelly.com Jelly is a simpler shared inbox for small teams (like us) to answer team email. We had just been sharing a login to Fastmail previously, but as email started getting busier, that really started to stink as a solution — no one knew who was going to answer what, if someone else saw an email or not, etc etc. And a Google Group would prove to be worse, as replies too easily got lost to personal inboxes if someone accidentally didn’t “Reply…
2024 · letsjelly.com · its alternatives →
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Dan Ariely and I are looking for ways to help people with high email load. One idea was Shortwhale, which we've tested for a few months now. The idea is super simple: It's a place to tell people how you prefer email and it offers a simple contact form that adds the necessary structure to email. Although technically trivial, it works extremely well for Dan. We have ideas on how to expand this but first we'd like to know if someone else might find this useful too (we know that this is only a solution for people who get tons of (unsolicited) email). Underlying to all of this is the idea to put…
2014 · its alternatives →
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Loop Email▲257Emailing for teams: Organize your Inbox into channels 💌
2018 · intheloop.io · its alternatives →
- 16

The much beloved email client now on Android
2019 · play.google.com · its alternatives →
- 17
Taurin▲328TL;DR: Taurin is an AI-powered, local-first email client that helps you clear your inbox faster and smarter. We’re building a Personal Agent that learns and adapts to your workflow and integrating it deeply into the email experience so you can reach your maximum productivity. What we currently support • Automatically determine the importance and reply-needs for each email and provide a dedicated view • Organize all conversations and files exchanged with a specific contact in a sidebar • Track when emails sent via Taurin are opened • Summarize and auto-label emails with customizable options •…
2024 · taurin.io · its alternatives →
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Sidemail 2.0▲306Hi all! I'm Kristyna, maker of Sidemail. I'd love to share with you what we've been building. We built Sidemail because sending emails from a SaaS app was way harder than it should be. Sidemail is made for developers and teams that want one simple place to handle SaaS emails with reliable delivery and no bloat. It has: - Everything for creating, managing and delivering SaaS emails in one platform, - Easy-to-use email API for sending password resets, receipts, etc. - Messenger for writing product updates and newsletters, - Email automations for onboarding and lifecycle flows, - Fast email…
Nov 2025 · sidemail.io · its alternatives →
- 21

Hi HN :) really excited to share this with you. The one thing AI reliably does is generate noise. Half the tools I see launch are just machines for producing more noise across more channels. And people are starting to see this in the form of emails in their inboxes as spam filters are struggling. There used to be a useful signal in email: the effort a sender put into customizing a message was a rough proxy for how relevant it actually was. AI killed that. Now it's customized slop with the appearance of effort with none of the cost. It is painful that the open internet / open channels…
Jul 2026 · captchainbox.com · its alternatives →
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Kanmail▲101Hey HN! Been a while.. last post for reference in 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22985055. Moved city, job and had two children since then which is wild :) Been working away shifting Kanmail over to a Go backend (using the excellent wails) and rewriting the frontend in TypeScript. This "new" v2 is much quicker, overcomes a bunch of old limitations (no age limit on paginating folders) and finally gets a working Linux AppImage (*my Linux test setup is somewhat limited and I expect there's plenty of edge cases here - hit me up if you have issues). Anyway, would love…
2020 · kanmail.io · its alternatives →
- 24

After struggling with low open rates in my small lifestyle software business, I decided to go down the rabbit hole that is email deliverability, learned a bunch of things I didn't know even after being in tech for a decade. A/B tested a bunch of things and finally got good results. I then decided to put together a comprehensive checklist of everything I learned and got me results to share with others. Now I help companies fix poor email deliverability and boost their email ROI. I want this checklist to be a repository of email best practices so I'm always looking to improve and update…
2023 · helloinbox.net · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →