AI email client that requires a Gmail or Google Workspace account to sign in. Microsoft 365 and Exchange are listed as not supported.
Gmail and Google Workspace users who want AI doing inbox work rather than sitting beside it, with AI search across thread history, AI-powered filters, autocomplete, summaries and attachment analysis, and a calendar-aware assistant that can send invites, extract events from emails and check availability. It suits buyers who want the model tier named rather than implied: Shortwave publishes Basic as Claude Haiku 4.5, Standard as Claude Sonnet 4.6, Advanced as Sonnet 4.6 with adaptive thinking and Expert as Claude Opus 4.6 with adaptive thinking. A free plan exists and is described as giving access to most productivity features including the AI executive assistant.
Outlook and Microsoft 365 shops should stop here: Shortwave's provider list reads "Microsoft 365 / Exchange - not supported at this time", Outlook.com, Hotmail and Live are "forwarding only, cannot send from address", and sign-in itself requires a Gmail or Google Workspace account. Organisations with a procurement checklist will hit a gap - Shortwave does not claim SOC 2 Type II or GDPR compliance and instead says to contact its team if your organisation requires them - and no data region is named beyond Google Cloud data centres. Anyone wanting to connect it to other systems needs a paid team tier: MCP integrations are limited to the Business, Premier and Max plans, are described as beta, support tool calls only, and cap usage at about 40 tools at once.
Pros
Cons
Not as your mail account. Shortwave's provider list states Microsoft 365 and Exchange are not supported at this time, and Outlook.com, Hotmail and Live are forwarding only - you cannot send from those addresses. Sign-in itself requires a Gmail or Google Workspace account, so Microsoft mail works only by forwarding into Gmail, with replies going out from the Gmail address.
Yes. Shortwave's billing documentation states the free plan gives access to most of its productivity features and capabilities, including the Shortwave AI executive assistant, and that multi-account support is available to free users. Paid plans add full email history import, better AI models and more comprehensive AI-powered search. Each paid plan also offers a 14-day free trial, and new subscriptions are billed monthly.
It excludes third-party training explicitly: "Your data will never be used to train third-party LLMs", and email content is never used to train third-party AI models. It names Google Cloud, OpenAI, Anthropic and Pinecone as the providers used, and states most AI workloads run open source models on hardware it controls. Whether Shortwave trains its own models is not addressed on the pages read.
Published team pricing is Business $30, Premier $45 and Max $120 per seat per month. Business states roughly 150-300 Standard intelligence AI requests per day; Premier is described as 2x more AI usage and Max as 6x, with thread limits of 50, 100 and 150 per AI search and 3, 10 and 50 AI-powered filters. The Individual tab publishes no figures.
Facts sourced from the vendor’s own site, last verified 2026-10-10.
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