A better email client, or a cross-channel agent.
Shortwave is one of the most thoughtfully designed AI email clients available — Ghostwriter learns your voice, Tasklets bridge email to the tools you use, and team shared inboxes make collaboration genuinely better. It started as a Gmail client and has since expanded to support Outlook, Exchange, Fastmail, Yahoo, and more. this+that is not an email client. It is an agent that works across Gmail, Outlook, Slack, and Teams, and turns what it finds into tasks and workflows.
A better way to do email vs. a way to do less email
Shortwave's thesis is that email can be genuinely great if you build it right from scratch — better AI writing, better team collaboration, smart automations from your inbox to the tools you use. That thesis is compelling, and Shortwave executes on it well. this+that's thesis is different: the problem is not that email clients are bad. The problem is that messages — across email, Slack, Teams — create work that doesn't get done because it's scattered, untracked, and manual. If you want the best Gmail experience, Shortwave is hard to beat. If you want the work that comes from all your messages to happen automatically, this+that is built for that.
Feature by feature
How the two products compare across the things that matter most.
| Topic | Shortwave | this+that |
|---|---|---|
| Core philosophy | The best AI email client. Better writing, smarter inbox, stronger team collaboration — all inside a reimagined Gmail experience. | Delegate the work that follows messages. Extract tasks, run workflows, keep teams in sync — across whatever channels work arrives through. |
| Email provider support | Gmail, Outlook, Exchange, Fastmail, Yahoo, and more — multi-provider support added January 2025. | Gmail and Outlook. Works with whatever your team uses. |
| Channels | Email only. Does not read Slack or Teams messages. | Gmail, Outlook, Slack, Teams, Google Calendar, and Outlook Calendar treated as one stream of incoming work. |
| AI writing | Ghostwriter learns your voice from past emails. Genuinely impressive — one of the best AI composition experiences in any email client. | AI draft replies and emails as workflow actions. Useful in automation context; not optimized for voice-matched manual composition. |
| Task extraction | Not available as a persistent layer. Email can be bridged to task tools via Tasklets, but you configure those connections manually. | Automatic. DoBox reads every conversation and extracts requests, decisions, follow-ups, commitments, and deadlines as trackable, assignable tasks. |
| Workflow automation | Tasklets: inbox-triggered automations that push email data to Slack, Notion, Asana, HubSpot, and a set of supported apps. | Full workflow builder. 32 action types. Plain-language creation. IF/ELSE branching, loops, sub-agents. Not limited to inbox triggers or a fixed integration set. |
| Team features | Shared inboxes, real-time thread commenting, assignment. Strong team email coordination — stronger than Superhuman. | Shared task view, task assignment, workflow delegation to teammates. Work-level coordination across channels, not just email thread coordination. |
| Conversational AI | AI assistant with full inbox history context. Ask questions about your email, get summaries, find information. | AI reasoning as a workflow step — used for decision-making and task classification rather than a conversational assistant interface. |
| External integrations | Fixed set of Tasklet integrations: Slack, Notion, Asana, HubSpot, Linear, and others. Integrations are Tasklet-defined rather than open standard. | Open MCP standard. GitHub, Notion, Jira, Dropbox, HubSpot, and any tool with an API. |
| Calendar integration | Scheduling assistant for finding meeting times and sending calendar invites. | Calendar automation as workflow steps: RSVP, create events, reschedule, manage attendees across Google and Outlook Calendar. |
| Pricing | Teams plan at $29/month. | Separate subscription. Free tier available. |
- Ghostwriter is one of the best AI email composition experiences available — it learns your writing voice from your email history.
- Thread and bundle summarization is fast and accurate for catching up on busy inboxes.
- Team collaboration is genuinely stronger than most competitors: shared inboxes, real-time commenting, and thread assignment.
- Conversational AI assistant with full inbox history context — useful for finding information and getting summaries on demand.
- Tasklets provide a straightforward way to bridge email triggers to popular tools without technical setup.
- Scheduling assistant makes it easy to find meeting times and send invites without leaving the inbox.
- Reads Slack and Teams alongside email — Shortwave does not yet read Slack or Teams messages.
- Reads Slack and Teams alongside email — all channels treated as one stream of incoming work.
- Task extraction: every message across all channels is scanned for requests, commitments, and deadlines — surfaced automatically in DoBox.
- Workflow automation is not limited to inbox triggers or a fixed integration set — 32 action types with IF/ELSE branching, loops, and sub-agents.
- Open MCP: connect any tool with an API — not just the Tasklet integration list.
- Work-level team coordination across channels, not just within email threads.
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