Shortwave: a new Firebase-powered email app

[Tyler Rockwood]

Hi Firebase-Talk -

I’m Tyler, a former Firebase engineer.

Today my team (most of us are Firebase veterans) are shipping a new product we’ve been working on for 2 years!

💌 Shortwave is a re-imagined email experience on top of your Gmail account 💌

We’ve used several Firebase products to build it:

• Hosting
• Auth
• Performance Monitoring
• Analytics
• Firebase Cloud Messaging

Some of the features we’re proud of:

• 💥 Default Workflow - Email is a to-do list. We’ve built a workflow that treats it that way. Snooze, Pin, re-order, bulk actions, keyboard shortcuts
• 📚 Bundles - Automatic & manual grouping of related emails
• 🧑‍🎨 Beautiful & Consistent Display - We wrote a custom headless browser engine from scratch to ensure your emails are beautiful and rendered quickly
• ⌨️ A Great Editor - Markdown, mentions, emoji, giphy, rich media support, quoting, forwarding, code blocks, and more
• 👯 Team Features - Like Slack, but with the whole world via email. Channels, mentions, typing indicators, presence, and more.

If you feel called to give it a try, head over to www.shortwave.com

I’m happy to answer any questions on our Firebase usage too.

- Tyler

[Andreas B]

Hi Tyler,

sounds great, I'd love to give it a try. I'm just generally a bit wary about trusting *any* app to handle my 10+ years archive of mails without messing up anything. Is there anything describing what happens with my Gmail inbox beyond the short "Gmail sync" statement to alleviate my fears, perhaps a blog post down the line? :)

[Tyler Rockwood]

Hey Andreas!

I totally understand your concerns. We currently only take actions in Gmail upon user action - we never take actions in Gmail automatically. In addition to this - we currently don't import or modify labels in gmail (our own labelling mechanism doesn't quite map to Gmail's at the moment). We also don't yet support deletion - so while we do ask for that permission (we're building this feature!) we'll never delete your mail. You can read a bit about our feature set and how they map to Gmail in our Shortwave 101 guide.

In addition to all that, when you initial sign up we only import your last 90 days of history, so there is no way we can mess up anything older than that 🙂 We should probably write up a guide about exactly how and which actions sync back to gmail. I'll add an item in our task tracker for this new guide - thanks!

We also take security very seriously as we know email can contain sensitive information.

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[Andreas B]

Thanks for the reply, giving it a try right now.