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Any tool that promises to make the process of managing your inbox even a smidge less onerous deserves some attention. Artificial intelligence tools, with their ability to read and produce text, can help. Rather than read the 30-email thread to catch up on the status of your project, you can get a four-bullet summary. Rather than sift through a cluttered pile of messages, you can find a clean inbox, organized by category.

We tested five different email tools that each have their own AI features, and recommend Shortwave for its great interface and its AI assistant that can summarize, write, translate, and answer questions about your emails.

Note: Some of the major email providers are baking AI into their products. Microsoft, for example, offers Microsoft 365 Copilot, an AI assistant that integrates with Outlook, as well as the company’s other productivity tools. Google’s Gemini Business plan similarly integrates AI into its productivity tools, including Gmail. Our review focused on email-specific tools, so we didn’t test either of those AI assistants, which also work with applications like Google Docs, PowerPoint, Excel, etc. Charter Pro members can read our upcoming article about using Copilot to make presentations in PowerPoint. 

Our pick

Shortwave

Shortwave is an AI-powered email tool. It helps you keep an organized inbox and includes an AI assistant that can summarize, write, translate, and answer questions about your emails.

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PROS

  • Its AI assistant is very useful, especially the summarization feature.
  • It organizes your inbox into “bundles,” making it much easier to catch up on email.
  • It has a great free plan.

CONS

  • Like any generative AI tool, its AI assistant doesn’t always produce accurate answers.
  • It’s only available for Gmail.

Our process

We evaluated five AI-enhanced email tools—Shortwave, Sanebox, Mailbutler, Klart AI, and Superhuman—on their interface, usefulness, and price. “Usefulness” is really a way of saying "How much easier would this make my workday?" and it was our most important criterion. We used each of the five options as our default email tool to see how much they improved upon the standard Gmail inbox. (The inbox in question varied from moderately cluttered to nearly organized, allowing us to effectively gauge how well each tool could help us achieve a consistently clean state.)

Shortwave was the clear winner. While Superhuman, a distant second, has some useful email shortcuts, its AI features weren’t as good. For example, we asked Superhuman to summarize a 12-message thread, and it presented a 14-bullet summary in confusing order with repetitive information. Shortwave provided a clean, accurate four-bullet summary. Between its price options—including a solid free plan—and its performance in our testing, Shortwave was our clear favorite. 

One important limitation of Shortwave is that it currently only supports Gmail and Google Workspace accounts. Their site says they hope to expand support to other providers in the future, but for now, that limits who can use the app.

Our recommendations

Here’s how Shortwave performed on our key criteria:

AI assistant: Shortwave’s AI assistant can summarize, write, translate, and answer questions about your emails. 

Summarize: For the most part, the summaries the tool provides are accurate and comprehensive. I found this particularly useful for getting up to speed on longer threads. The assistant doesn’t only summarize the content of emails; it gives a zoomed-out view of entire threads with bullet points like, “Despite multiple follow-ups, you have not yet received a confirmation for the interview.” (That observation was, unfortunately, correct.) 

Still, as with any generative AI tool, the summarization feature isn’t 100% accurate. For example, I asked it to summarize a CFO Daily newsletter about CFOs becoming CEOs and presidents of organizations. In the summary, the assistant mentioned that Alphabet’s Ruth Porat is a notable example of someone who made the transition from CFO to CEO. In reality, she made the transition from CFO to president & chief investment officer, as the article stated. 

Write: My favorite part of Shortwave’s writing feature is the app’s ability to suggest times to meet based on your calendar. I can write, “Email Jane Doe to set up an interview about her recent paper and propose times to meet based on my availability,” and it will generate a decent first draft with time suggestions. Although Shortwave’s writing feature is solid, I found myself using it less than I would have thought. For the most part, by the time I’m done editing the AI assistant’s draft to say exactly what I want it to say, I might as well have written it myself. 

Translate: The ability to seamlessly translate emails into different languages holds a lot of promise for international businesses. This is the feature we experimented with the least, but it did a good job with our limited testing translating messages from English to Russian.

Answer: The ability to answer questions based on your email history has the potential to be one of Shortwave's most useful features. I can’t tell you how much time I spend trying to find information in old emails. Shortwave’s performance here was mostly good. For example, when I asked the assistant if I’ve ever interviewed someone from Adobe, it searched for about five seconds and correctly said that I interviewed Brandon Clark, the company’s global head of talent development, on June 20, 2023 and provided the underlying email thread as proof. Still, users need to approach this feature with caution. In one instance, the assistant fabricated an entire back-and-forth between me and a Boston Consulting Group PR representative. The interaction, though fake, seemed plausible. 

Organization: One of my favorite aspects of Shortwave is the way it organizes your inbox. The app puts many emails into “bundles”—a bundle for newsletters, a bundle for calendar invites, and so on. This makes it a lot easier to manage your email. When I came back from vacation, I had hundreds of unread emails waiting for me. Rather than cleaning out my inbox one email at a time, I went to bundles like “updates,” scanned them for important items, moved those items, and deleted the remaining 100+ emails in one click. Shortwave also lets you control how your inbox is organized. You can, for example, move important items to the top of your inbox and create your own bundles, which I did to organize all of the emails I send myself. 

Interface: Shortwave is clean and simple, and the way it categorizes emails makes it easy to skim your inbox. For example, your inbox will display bundles like this:

You can click the bundle to expand it into this:

From there, you could decide none of these emails is worth reading and delete the whole bundle. Or, you could dig deeper into one of the emails by clicking it, which takes you to a screen like this:

Here, you can read the email while still seeing the entire bundle to the left.

Pricing deep dive

Shortwave has four different pricing plans:

  • The free plan has many of the great features you would want, including an inbox organized into bundles and the ability to use the AI assistant to summarize, write, and translate your emails. However, you don’t get the AI-assisted search, and the regular search—i.e., the type of search you get in Gmail—is limited to emails from within the past 90 days. For anything older than that, you would have to search in the Gmail app.
  • The personal plan offers all of the features from the free plan plus the ability to search your entire email history and use the AI-assisted search feature on emails from within the past year. It costs $7 per user per month, billed annually, or $8.50 per user per month, billed monthly. 
  • The pro plan allows you to use the AI-assisted search for emails up to three years old. It also includes a feature that learns your writing style to generate better drafts and an autocomplete feature that makes suggestions while you write. Users can use the pro features on up to three different email accounts when signed in on the same device as their primary paid account. It costs $14 per user per month, billed annually, or $18 per user per month, billed monthly. 
  • The business plan allows you to use the AI-assisted search for emails up to five years old, and it lets you customize prompts to improve the AI assistant’s email drafts. For example, you can ask it to always include your scheduling link for emails about scheduling. Users can use the business features on up to 10 different email accounts when signed in on the same device as their primary paid account. It costs $24 per user per month, billed annually, or $30 per user per month, billed monthly. 

How we chose what to review

A growing set of email tools offer AI features. Some, like Shortwave, have AI assistants capable of summarizing, writing, and answering questions about emails. Others, like Sanebox, have narrower focuses, like organizing your inbox. We included both sets of tools in our review, sourcing ideas from articles, product reviews, and ChatGPT. 

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