Shortwave is Google Inbox’s spiritual successor, created by a team of

If you ask me, Inbox by Gmail was the single best way to handle emails and was years, if not decades, ahead of its time. But we all know how things panned out. Google decided to discontinue the service in favor of the original Gmail client, promising to bring over some of the smarts — only to never fully follow through on that. Many other services have since tried to pick up the slack, but none ended up coming close. Now another one is trying its shot at the task, and it would seem like it’s the most promising one yet: Shortwave.

Shortwave is a new email client created by ex-Googlers, a team consisting of renowned experts like CEO Andrew Lee. He’s the brain behind Firebase, the Google platform that revolutionized app development, and now, he and his team are setting out to do the same for emails — relying heavily on the ideas first introduced by Google with Inbox.

When you put Shortwave and Inbox side-by-side, you’ll immediately see just how related they are. Like Inbox, Shortwave sets out to automatically organize your emails for you and wants to make it easier to sort through the influx of distractions and notifications you receive every day. To do that, it’s treating your inbox like a todo list with items you can mark done once you don’t need to react to them anymore. You can pin important emails to the top of the client, and you can manually reorder all items via drag-and-drop according to priority rather than chronological order. You can also snooze emails altogether, like on Gmail, when you don’t have time to deal with them right now.

Shortwave utilizes the same “secret weapon” as Inbox. It automatically sorts related emails into bundles based on contacts and context. Calendar notifications, social media updates, and newsletters all get loped into their own respective bundles, making them take up less space and helping you ignore them until you’re ready to interact with them. Any conversations with a single contact, even when they stretch across multiple threads, are loped into a single bundle as well. All emails in a bundle can be marked done or archived via a single button, just like you can mark all older emails done all at once, too.

Shortwave is even thinking things a little further than Inbox, and is trying its best to make those dreaded email threads easier to navigate. You can easily tell when new people get added to the conversation or when they leave, and the client is capable of handling diverging conversations that started in the same thread.

The service is also looking to improve the process of drafting emails. It supports all the usual formatting options but adds markdown support as a cherry on top, complete with easy access to emoji and GIFs.

After a short hands-on session, I’m already in love with the service, but it’s obvious that there are still a few things missing. For one, it isn’t possible to outright delete emails (what am I supposed to keep old calendar or shipping notifications for?), and for another, you can’t preview attachments right in the client —…