"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.
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.
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!)
Yeah, except the way I read OP's comment is he thought the whole implementation (server, storage, etc) was all local in the browser. But this is NOT the case (I thought that was the case too initially).
in the manifest.json then "The size of unlimited storage is limited only by the availability of space in the user's hard drive." Not quite sure if that's how they do it.
> “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.)
> 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.
One issue I have with gmail is that it takes a million clicks and like 10 seconds to filter email so that I never see that sender/subject/whatever again. Do you have a solution?
I use gmail app on mobile (and Nine for talking to work Exchange server). I don't use Priority inbox feature. I use incoming filters to apply labels. I try to process each message once - and am happy to archive anything non-actionable.
For mail I don't wish to receive or keep, I'll take the time to stop it being sent to me, rather than set up a filter/blocker at my end. For mail I only want to be able to search for later I'll filter to auto-archive on receipt.
I try to avoid using my inbox as a todo list - having a separate task tracker makes this possible (different tools vary the ease of this, of course).
I suspect most people who struggle with email don't have a task tracker (or if they do, they aren't using that properly either) but that's based on a relatively small set of anecdata.
When you say it takes a million clicks and 10 seconds to filter email - do you mean to create a new filter on an arbitrary email? How often are you creating new filters?
I've seen this claim several times in this thread now. Having used Fastmail since 2013, how is it blazingly fast since its UI will randomly perform a full reload when you switch back to its tab? It happens multiple times a day.
The last time I've had Gmail suddenly decide to reload the page the moment I need to use it? Never.
Uhm, people think gmail is fast? I can fetch a brand new page on my phone over 4G faster than browsing gmail on an i7 desktop. And fast search? Only if you don't have any desire to find anything.
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
Does it have an equivalent for Bundles (specifically bundles in the inbox) - the one feature that distinguishes Google Inbox ( 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.)
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".
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)
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
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...
[2] http://caniuse.com/indexeddb/embed/
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...
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!)
"Works best with IE 6" is so old now you'd think tech folks would think twice.
Mutt, Pine, Eudora, and Thunderbird, welcome home.
Dead Comment
Apparently it's possible, assuming the device has a sufficiently large storage and, I'm assuming, the user accepts.
"For this reason, the browser version of the email app only works in Google Chrome"
think electron app, but without electron, and instead running directly in chrome.
*in the near future
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1921048/limit-of-localst...
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...
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.
What kind of workflow do you have where you need to delete a few thousand messages, and how often does that happen?
Can you describe your workflow?
One issue I have with gmail is that it takes a million clicks and like 10 seconds to filter email so that I never see that sender/subject/whatever again. Do you have a solution?
For mail I don't wish to receive or keep, I'll take the time to stop it being sent to me, rather than set up a filter/blocker at my end. For mail I only want to be able to search for later I'll filter to auto-archive on receipt.
I try to avoid using my inbox as a todo list - having a separate task tracker makes this possible (different tools vary the ease of this, of course).
I suspect most people who struggle with email don't have a task tracker (or if they do, they aren't using that properly either) but that's based on a relatively small set of anecdata.
When you say it takes a million clicks and 10 seconds to filter email - do you mean to create a new filter on an arbitrary email? How often are you creating new filters?
[0]: Keyboard shortcut for More > arrow down to Filter messages like these > adjust rules if needed > Enter
I would say that gmail performance is well above adequate – especially in search. But try Fastmail if you want to see blazing.
The last time I've had Gmail suddenly decide to reload the page the moment I need to use it? Never.
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/
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.)
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?
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.
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.
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.