
Superhuman is what Gmail would be if built today - Stanleyc23
https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/18/rapportive-founders-new-startup-superhuman-is-what-gmail-would-be-if-built-today/
======
sixdimensional
"Unlike most browser-based email, which is server-based, Superhuman can store
and index gigabytes of email in the web browser itself."

Did I miss something, or what technology can store gigabytes in a web
browser?! Unless they are compressing email aggressively (possible) and
storing in SessionStorage/LocalStorage, decompressing on the fly... then this
sounds like marketing fluff, or just written poorly.

~~~
reissbaker
IndexedDB can store a huge amount of data — your browser will allow up to 50%
of the free space on your machine to be used. [1] In most cases that would be
gigabytes.

IndexedDB doesn't have full browser support yet (Edge is listed as having
"partial support" [2]), but Chrome, Firefox, and recent versions of Safari all
support it.

[1] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API/IndexedDB_A...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API/IndexedDB_API/Browser_storage_limits_and_eviction_criteria)

[2] [http://caniuse.com/indexeddb/embed/](http://caniuse.com/indexeddb/embed/)

~~~
exikyut
> IndexedDB can store a huge amount of data ... In most cases that would be
> gigabytes.

You are of course right, but it's always good to surface pathological worst-
case scenarios as interesting counterbalances.

IndexedDB has really, really REALLY bad performance. It's like a turtle that's
been trapped in molasses. I did some benchmarks on my (old) laptop here:
[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42288596/websql-has-
incr...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42288596/websql-has-increasing-
browser-support-whats-its-future)

For a particularly rare edge case, I periodically have to SIGKILL Chrome so it
doesn't crash (due to failed SQLite assertions) when my disk gets full and I
have to shuffle things around to make space. In the last instance of this
taking place, / had 820KB free.

(Context would probably be useful here: I have a 15+-year long diskspace issue
created by being given many many old computers with tiny hard drives and not
having the infrastructure/knowhow (when I was younger) to move/sync active
projects between machines. I just need to get a couple large HDDs so I can
collect and dedupe everything, but I can't work due to health issues so that's
proving... fun. This is also blocking all kinds of things such as getting my
first smartphone, so I have nowhere to back it up onto!)

~~~
voltagex_
You've got no contact details in your profile but in the very small chance
that you're in Australia, I've got a number of spare hard drives I could give
you.

~~~
ehnto
There are a surprising amount of Australians here I have noted.

~~~
cyphar
It depends when you frequent HN -- timezones make it fairly easy to spot us.

------
Jedd
> “We decided it would be blazingly fast; it would be visually gorgeous; the
> whole thing would work offline; you wouldn’t need a multitude of browser
> extensions to get things done; and people would be materially faster at
> doing their email.”

I've not used the previous product(s) this guy has worked on, but from reading
TFA, and notably the way they reiterate those claims a few times, I'm
confused.

First, general nomenclature grumble, using an existing english word as a
product name.

They seem to be positioning as a superior option to gmail, for current gmail
users. Disclaimer - I've been using email since the late 1980's, and gmail
since 2004. I've also used a bundle of other mail clients (kmail/kontact,
outlook, thunderbird, etc).

Gmail _is_ blazingly fast - I've not seen it stall or choke or any tasks

Visually gmail looks clean and effective to my eye -- and I don't think
_gorgeousness_ would be a compelling reason to move away.

Gmail _can_ work fine offline - either mobile device, or the wonderful Gmail
Offline extension[1] -- sure, it's Chrom* only, but I gather the 'gigabytes of
offline' in this thing is Chrom* only also(?). That extension is fantastic for
flights or when I'm working in remote regions, and don't want to deal with a
mobile device.

Apart from that, I don't have any other gmail-specific extensions - but even
if I did, is it believed these are harder to set up and learn than a different
mail client?

Really at a loss how _I_ could be faster 'at doing my email' \-- for people I
see who struggle with email, a small portion of their problem is familiarity
with the features of their client, but most of it is because their workflow is
poor. Rarely is it because the mail client is actually broken and working
against you. (Outlook being the obvious exception.)

[1] [https://gmail.googleblog.com/2011/08/using-gmail-calendar-
an...](https://gmail.googleblog.com/2011/08/using-gmail-calendar-and-docs-
without.html)

~~~
vidarh
> Gmail is blazingly fast - I've not seen it stall or choke or any tasks

Try to delete a few thousand messages at a time, and see it not just choke,
but cause timeouts or 500 errors when you try to reload the inbox in another
tab.

At least it consistently does this for me over several accounts, both regular
Gmail and paid apps accounts.

~~~
Jedd
Look, fair call, I've never tried to delete thousands of messages in one go.

What kind of workflow do you have where you need to delete a few thousand
messages, and how often does that happen?

~~~
vidarh
Server notifications gone berserk. Cleaning up old tags, seeing as Gmail is so
very fond of encouraging archival instead of deletion.

I've developed habits of using mail for all kinds of notifications because it
tends to work with other services, and it _mostly_ works with Gmail too,
exception deletion it a totally pathological case. All they'd needed to do
would be to queue large operations in the background...

------
awestroke
This is an ad written by a PR agency.

~~~
fny
That's pretty much _all_ of TechCrunch's startup section.[0] As far as I know,
it's not sponsored content: some editor still rifles through PR agency
submissions until she find something that she feels will pique readers'
interest.

For example, here are the last 10 headlines for that category:

\- Tracking viewer responses to media, Cinemmerse wants to set the stage for
‘responsive’ entertainment

\- Rapportive founder’s new startup Superhuman is what Gmail would be if built
today

\- Y Combinator-backed VIDA turns artwork into fashion, accessories and more

\- Immersv raises $10.5M to shake up mobile advertising with some VR flair

\- Virtual telescope company Slooh is ready for the eclipse

\- Original Tech helps banks offer better loan applications

\- ‘Airbnb for boats’ startup Boatsetter buys competitor Boatbound

\- LiftIgniter raises $6.4M to bring website personalization to the rest of
the internet

\- Bitcoin wallet ‘Blockchain’ adds Ethereum support

\- B2B platform Releaf helps African businesses by taking the guesswork out of
networking

[0]: [https://techcrunch.com/startups/](https://techcrunch.com/startups/)

------
andybak
Does it have an equivalent for Bundles (specifically bundles in the inbox) -
the one feature that distinguishes Google Inbox (
[https://inbox.google.com](https://inbox.google.com) ) from every other client
as far as I know.

I'd be very interested in a competitor for that feature as I couldn't do
without it now and I'd like to know I have options if Google retires it or
modify it beyond recognition.

(Brief summary - they are like smart folders but they appear as a single item
in your inbox. It enables me to bundle up various newsletters, server alerts
and more broadly themed collections of mail and decide which ones should
appear in my inbox immediately, daily or never. If I used traditional folders
or labels then they end up forgotten or ignored. It allows you to
file/categorize but still maintains the "my inbox is my todo list" paradigm.)

~~~
superlopuh
Spark has something similar. In any case, I've found the tool useful not to
triage incoming mail into "read now", and "read later", but into "read at some
point", and "unsubscribe immediately".

~~~
andybak
Spark also has the flaw of being MacOS and iOS only. Sadly I need Android,
Windows and MacOS at the very least but I'm much more comfortable knowing
something is fully cross-platform wherever possible. Realistically this means
browser + Android native + iOS native (unless the browser version is extremely
well coded and runs satisfactorily on a mobile browser)

------
e12e
So, I'm looking at: [https://superhuman.com/](https://superhuman.com/)

And I can't find pricing, TOS, talk about data access (from the features, it
appears they want to pull my mail through their servers?) - and a few features
that breaks with good email/netiquette (read notifications, links in email
that rely on http(s)).

What is this product? What's the monetization plan?

~~~
vacri
> _Superhuman, however, is only targeting a fraction of the email market:
> business users who will pay a subscription for a more powerful client. For
> this reason, the browser version of the email app only works in Google
> Chrome._

If they're only targeting business users... why don't they also support Edge?
Weird. Doubly weird that all their screenshots are in MacOS, which has plenty
of safari users, and isn't enterprise-friendly.

So they really are carving out a very small niche - small upmarket businesses
that are willing to pay for something other than gmail (when paid gmail also
gets you the rest of the google apps suite). Feels like a shonky business-case
to me - I can't see how they'd competitively price the accounts if they're
basically ruling out companies with large user-bases.

~~~
e12e
Thanks for pointing that out: that at least gives me an idea of what this
thing is, beyond the marketing fluff.

Now, what kind of email servers/hosts do they support? Exchange? Only Gmail?
Any Imap? Pop3? Do they have a policy on tls support?

As for market/product/niche - I actually think carving a thin slice out of the
business market is a great idea. You could probably get target/interested
businesses to pay a pretty premium for a "good email solution", whatever that
means for any particular business. I don't think neither exchange nor Gmail
would be particularly hard to compete with as a product. Much like some will
pay a pretty premium for an ide that boost productivity and/or happiness...

That said, I'm now pretty sure I'm _not_ a target customer for superhuman. But
that's fine, I whish them best of luck.

------
bastijn
Almost all, if not all functionality on their front page is available in
Newton email client(s) today. Of course, their main claim, speed is what
should set them apart. All the others are not really things that would turn me
over. Gmail, Newton (exchange work client) are clean enough. Newton has all
other features as superchargers. One thing that I miss in superhuman is
integration with Evernote, todoist, you name it. They don't talk about it (or
I missed it). Also, for a super clean interface that landing page is not the
example I hope.

P.s. I hope it will not be exactly like Gmail and have their own email
domains. [Name]@superhuman.com is even less professional than Gmail. It's
borderline unusable.

------
secfirstmd
Sigh...Any chance of better e2e crypt in this email product?

------
bastijn
For those who want to sign up for early access. It is an option to join the
paid early access. They forgot to mention this on their sign up page. So take
care.

------
accnt
> "If you want to join our paid early-access VIP program, please reply and let
> me know :)"

If you'd come up with this upfront I wouldn't have signed up.

------
mxuribe
I - for one - certainly hope this gets launched, and gets utilized. This type
of application as well as unhosted types of apps are what i hope the future
will be. See also [http://unhosted.org/adventures/9/Sending-and-receiving-
email...](http://unhosted.org/adventures/9/Sending-and-receiving-email-from-
unhosted-web-apps.html)

------
khazhoux
Product may turn out well, but the pitch "What would email look like if it
were built today?" is literally said every single year.

------
balladeer
I don't see any improvement here. Not visually at least. It's just like Gmail
web interface; a bit different, not necessarily a bit better. Also, if adding
all the social/people widgets on the sidebar isn't clutter then I wonder what
would clutter be.

I don't get this idea - "gmail is cluttered". I would like to know if there's
something I am missing. It looks sufficiently clean and uncluttered to me at
least. And with a decent Internet connection it's fast too. Well, it's
definitely not slow.

For me the latest source clutter are all these hundreds of new apps/services
claiming to fix things which aren't really broken or not fix anything at all.

Side-note: Just wondering (it may not be the case), is it common for tech
blogs/portals like TC publish sponsored/PR posts without marking the post as
such?

------
gcatalfamo
I honestly couldn't tell if the product was interesting due to the amount of
marketing speech involved...

------
tbrock
Superhuman is great.

I've been lucky enough to have been able to use it for a while now and I'm
addicted. The team is super responsive to feedback and take the science of
email to the next level.

~~~
patejam
What does it mean to be "addicted" to email? Emails are very important, but in
an ideal world I'd spend as minimal time as possible handling emails.

~~~
wott
I can't tell if the comment to which you answer (and its other reply) is
serious or sarcastic: _great, lucky, be able to, addicted, team, super,
responsive, science of email, next level_. Sounds like a bingo (I almost had
to keep 50% of the text in my selection...).

The reply is of the same kind: _changed completely, my relationship (with
email!), become indispensable_. Plus the "200 mails a day, wow".

It reminds me of my former manager, who couldn't be arsed not to destroy the
emails I sent him (must have been a zero-inbox maniac): "You know, I have to
manage 80, sometimes 100 mails a day." and forced me to recompose them to send
them again (because he suddenly couldn't wait that I come back on the machine
on which I typed the original mail).

Yeah, well, I've been getting 300 to 800 mails a day for the last 25 years and
I have them all archived (OK, for the 20 years old ones, they must be on a
hard drive... somewhere :-) but you could ask me anything for the last couple
of years and I would find it after a few minutes, worst case. I even found my
Fidonet netmails a couple of years ago). I never _lost_ a mail since I don't
delete any (except the occasional spam which got through anti-spam layers).

------
Salamat
That could explain why Superhuman Chrome has so many open processes in Task
Manager and uses so much freaking RAM.

------
rb666
Anyone know if they will support custom domains? I will never want to be stuck
to domain I don't own again.

------
KaiserPro
Doesn't appear to have folders, or am I missing something?

Filters and folders are a god send for me. I get > 1000 emails a day, so inbox
zero using the traditional methods (ie sit there and go though them all) are
both stupid and impractical.

------
alpeb
I just want an web-based email client that allows me to filter out emails that
are not from my contacts. AFAIK gmail can't do that. I hope this does.

------
savrajsingh
Reminds me of... what was Gabor's email app again?

~~~
nickspag
reMail?

~~~
savrajsingh
Yes!

------
amelius
The name is a bit odd.

What is it called in German? Übermensch?

------
quickben
"undo send"?

~~~
danso
Maybe it's the Unix fan in me talking, but I don't get the point of "undo
send". Why are you hitting "send" if you have doubts about sending, instead of
putting it into the Drafts folder and taking a 10 minute break? If you're
afraid of sending an email with a typo, why not get into the habit of
proofreading to your satisfaction _before_ sending the email?

"Undo send" seems to me to be inherently inferior to having some self-
discipline and patience. Whatever last second doubts you've had are now simply
pushed forward. Except now you've set a timer, which creates additional chance
for failure -- either on the back end or on the user side, e.g. the timer
expiring just as you try to panic cancel -- that there isn't when you _just
don 't hit send in the first place_.

I get that products have to be designed for human comfort over pure technical
effectiveness, but this is design that appeases -- at a very surface level --
one of our least helpful indiscretions.

~~~
jacalata
> Undo send" seems to me to be inherently inferior to having some self-
> discipline and patience

I eagerly await your new email client which provides both self discipline and
patience to users. Until it releases, I suspect the Undo Send option will
continue to be used.

~~~
danso
But email has been this way for a very long time. And aren't many other common
user-to-user messaging systems this way? iOS messages and old-fashioned
texting/SMS, for instance. And postal mail and phone calls and answering
machines and face-to-face interactions, for that matter.

~~~
jacalata
I think of it as more important when email is being used as an announcement
medium - I'm ok leaving a mistake/sending a correction to one or two people,
but not 1100.

~~~
danso
Presumably you also put more time and focus into emails that are being sent to
1,100 recipients versus emails to 1 recipient, and you send more of the latter
than you do the former. But the "undo send" gives you 10 minutes of extra-edit
time to that important announcement as well as every other email you send.

If "undo send" gives a psych boost to being obsessive-compulsive, this still
doesn't address the additional layer of possible failure. You have better
control over your ability to not hit "Send" then you do to do a panic cancel
as you do a last second proofread.

~~~
mod
I accidentally ctrl+enter fairly often when formatting emails.

You're trying to cram everyone's problem into the same box, it's silly.

There's plenty of reasons you might undo an email if you had the chance.

Taking a 10-minute break is not something I've ever done before I sent an
email.

~~~
danso
I've done that too. For emails and for things that have an undo/delete option
since their inception (Twitter, Facebook, Slack). With email I've accepted to
be more careful about when sending very important emails. And for less
important emails, be OK with sending an addendum, even when it's on a mailing
list.

------
NegativeLatency
I'll stick with Mail.app thank you.

~~~
pookeh
Exactly! You can't compete when the features that you think make you stand out
the most are also available in free, default and widely-used apps.

~~~
gnicholas
I use Mail.app also, but man is the search horrendous. I understand that it's
supposed to get a lot better (faster, more accurate) in High Sierra, but even
Apple employees I know complain about it (and iOS mail search, which is also
slow/inaccurate).

------
1_2__4
Admit it, you knew before you clicked that one of its defining features would
be even more white space.

~~~
ibash
There's a fix for that: [https://dribbble.com/shots/3401818-Superhuman-Hyper-
Contrast...](https://dribbble.com/shots/3401818-Superhuman-Hyper-Contrast-
Theme) :)

------
jk2323
Interesting.

OT: As a former PINE/ALPINE User I found that reliable Email clients seem to
be rare. There seems not to be much besides Thunderbird and Evolution. I
neither got Claws Mail nor iScribe to work with my servers under Linux. Any
other email client recommendation for Linux?

~~~
DSMan195276
Personally I've found myself fairly happy using the combo of mutt and mbsync
(with gmail). It does unfortunately require downloading all your mail (Which
is a bit messy in the beginning since Google sets a limit for how much you can
download per month IIRC), but mbsync has been by far the best mail
downloader/syncer I've found. I set it up probably well over a year ago now
and haven't had to touch my setup or configuration at all, and it has worked
perfectly the entire time.

It is definitely true that mutt takes a bit of work to tame, but most of my
.muttrc is just stuff I copied after googling so it really isn't too crazy.
There's tons of basic 'Gmail' .muttrc's out there that you can just modify to
use the maildir from mbsync rather then IMAP from gmail.

------
tluyben2
Right. From the looks of it that is not true; when Gmail came out and I got an
invite, I started by 'importing' all my mail and using it as I was using my
own mail server; back then my life was my mailbox and I received 10000
messages a day in folders like spam, server telemetry and so on. Gmail
promised scalability and good spam control and 'never delete mail'. I did just
that; over the years I have worked with Google engineers to make Gmail better
as my particular inbox clogged up stuff regularly especially after the public
at large got Gmail. Now it works perfectly and nothing else seems to work for
me as it all just dies. But this was a feature and use case for Gmail; not for
these guys it seems. Which is fine by the way. Different use case.

------
londons_explore
I consider email a bit of a dead tech.

Outside the workplace, it's rarely used for personal messages anymore. It's
limited to confirmation messages, promotional mailings, forgot password links
and that's about it.

The days of email are over. Everything moved into silos like WhatsApp because
they offer instant responses email could never offer and a nicer UI.

~~~
AceJohnny2
> Outside the workplace

Well good news, workplaces are still a thing and where a lot of economic
activity happens.

Email provides ubiquitous, traceable, asynchronous, storable messaging. Until
something can entirely supplant it I don't see it disappearing anytime soon.

~~~
nerflad
> _Email provides ubiquitous, traceable, asynchronous, storable messaging.
> Until something can entirely supplant it I don 't see it disappearing
> anytime soon._

Long live email. Anything that replaces it will probably be a closed
proprietary protocol and I don't look forward to that at all.

~~~
RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u
I've often wondered: what's preventing someone from building an IM client on
top of e-mail? While it's very inefficient for short messages, we're not using
dial-up anymore (and I'd argue it wouldn't be that bad even on dial-up).
Furthermore, e-mail could serve as only the slow, max-compatibility path, with
some fast path (IMAP public folders? Or even a completely unrelated protocol)
when the users are using compatible clients.

Okay, so I guess the idea is not so much IM-over-e-mail, but rather a schema
that maps IM operations into e-mail operations.

~~~
Andrex
I've had this thought _very_ often, and (using your comment as motivation) I
think I might use this weekend as an opportunity to try hacking something
together. Maybe even add SMS fallback using Twilio or something.

