What is Shortwave?
Shortwave is an email client and AI assistant built around Gmail. It synchronizes messages and Gmail actions across web, macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android, then adds natural-language search, instant thread summaries, personalized drafting, inbox organization, AI filters, calendar scheduling, integrations, and team collaboration. It also offers familiar email controls such as splits, bundles, todos, scheduled delivery, follow-up reminders, tracking protection, and keyboard commands.
The product is not a lightweight writing box that sees only text pasted into a prompt. To provide search, threading, labels, contact suggestions, summaries, and personalized replies, Shortwave processes mailbox content and metadata. Its privacy policy says it syncs the Gmail inbox, email contents, contacts, profile information, and encrypted Gmail authentication tokens. That broad context is what makes mailbox-wide questions useful, and it is the central security decision in an evaluation.
AI work across email and connected tools
The AI Assistant can find emails in natural language, analyze multiple threads or attachments, identify action items, draft and improve replies, translate content, and organize a mailbox. Its Ghostwriter feature derives a writing style from previously sent email. Calendar access supports availability questions, event creation, and scheduling messages. AI filters can label, star, archive, or delete incoming mail according to a plain-language rule.
These are actions, not just answers. Start with read-only search and drafting, require review before sending, and test every mutating operation on a noncritical label or mailbox. A model may choose the wrong thread, mistake an old price for a current one, include a confidential passage in a reply, archive a required record, or create an event for the wrong time zone. Bulk cleanup and natural-language deletion deserve a reversible queue rather than one-click trust.
Shortwave integrations can give the assistant access to services such as Slack, Notion, Asana, Linear, HubSpot, Zapier, web browsing, and custom MCP servers. That enables useful sequences—find a customer request, draft a reply, and update a project—but also joins separate permission domains. Approve integrations individually, restrict destination scopes, inspect what context is sent, and prevent prompt instructions inside untrusted email or attachments from authorizing external actions.
Plans and real cost
Shortwave's billing guide says a free plan includes most core productivity capabilities and AI Assistant access. The current pricing page promotes a 14-day trial and lists three paid business plans. Business costs $30 per seat per month and includes standard intelligence, more AI usage, five years of AI search history, up to 50 threads per AI search, and three AI-powered filters.
Premier costs $45 per seat per month. It adds advanced intelligence, twice the Business AI usage, unlimited AI search history, up to 100 threads per search, ten filters, and twice the search-context tokens. Max costs $120 per seat per month, with expert intelligence, six times Business usage, up to 150 threads per search, 50 filters, and three times the context tokens. The pricing table identifies different Anthropic Claude model levels for these intelligence tiers as of the review date.
Daily usage is not a simple fixed prompt count because request complexity and model level change quota consumption. Shortwave estimates roughly 150–300 standard-intelligence requests a day on Business. All team members must share a plan, while one user's paid plan can cover that person's multiple signed-in email accounts. Price the required seats, model quality, history, thread count, filters, context, and integration load—not merely the lowest headline price.
Privacy, models, retention, and deletion
Shortwave says it complies with Google's API Services User Data Policy and has passed the CASA Tier 2 assessment. Its security guide states that email is not used to train third-party LLMs and names Google Cloud, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Pinecone among the subprocessors that may handle data to provide the service. It also says internal customer-data access requires explicit permission, hardware-key multifactor authentication, and audit logging. Buyers needing SOC 2 Type II or GDPR documentation are directed to contact the company, so availability and scope should be confirmed rather than inferred.
The privacy policy says Google Data is used to provide the service, is not used for advertising, and is not normally read by humans except with affirmative consent, for security or legal needs, or for aggregated and anonymized internal operations. It also says data may be transferred to the United States and retained as long as reasonably necessary for the stated purposes, business needs, or law. Users can request deletion, and Shortwave says it does not sell personal data.
Those statements do not substitute for a configured retention schedule. Determine how account deletion affects indexed mail, vectors, backups, logs, shared threads, team archives, connected tools, and data that remains in Gmail. Because actions synchronize back to Gmail, archiving, labeling, or deleting in Shortwave changes the mailbox even though original message text is not overwritten.
Verdict
Shortwave is compelling for Gmail users whose problem is not writing one email but understanding and acting across an entire inbox. Search, summaries, personalized drafting, organization, filters, calendars, and collaboration form a coherent workflow. The same breadth means the pilot should begin with a low-risk mailbox, minimal integrations, human approval for sends and destructive actions, test queries with known answers, and documented deletion and incident procedures. It can be an effective AI email workspace when convenience is matched by mailbox-level governance.
