Whether you're discussing new product features in a small group or sending cat photos to your entire team, Shortwave's real-time, team-oriented features promote focused conversations and collaboration. And it's super easy to get started.
Shortwave workspaces are collections of channels that you can use to communicate and collaborate with teammates. Create a workspace for any team to bring structure and transparency to your ongoing email conversations.
If your team already has a workspace — ask a teammate for an invite! Otherwise, head on over to the workspaces page and click the create workspace
button on the bottom of the page.
You can get started with Shortwave for free — even with your team! To unlock unlimited search and remove collaboration limits, you'll need to upgrade your workspace to a paid plan. Learn more about the free plan limits and pricing on our pricing page. We also have a detailed billing page in our help center as well.
Upgrading to the Standard Plan gives your workspace roles so you can control who manages details about your workspace.
Once you have a workspace, invite your team to give everyone access to your workspace's channels. Just click the members on the workspaces page and then hit that invite button. This will send them an email with a link to join.
You must be and owner or an admin to invite new members to a workspace
Channels are dedicated places that bring teammates together. You can create channels for topics, projects, teams, or whatever you want! For those who have used Slack and Microsoft Teams channels before, Shortwave channels should feel familiar.
If you're not a member of any channels — create or join some from the workspaces page. Any channel you add to the workspace will also be available for your teammates to join. Here at Shortwave, we use channels like: 📢 Shortwave team
, 💾 Engineering
, 🎨 Product & Design
, 🎲 Random
& 🐕 Pets
.
Although channels may look like chat, they are still just emails! This means you get some pretty cool benefits 😎
Check out our Shortwave 101 for more on bundles and notifications
Enjoy real-time messaging and contextualized conversation history to help you better connect and collaborate with your team.
In Shortwave, we make email delightful by combining the joy of chat with the power of email. When talking with other Shortwave users, you can transform your email experience to feel more connected and have more fun!
⚡️ Instant delivery and typing indicators bring your email up to speed (literally) with modern chat for seamless, real-time conversations
👍 Emoji reactions give you a quick way to acknowledge a message, conduct informal polls, or just express yourself with other Shortwave users
🌙 Availability statues let you quickly see which teammates are online, offline, or in do-not-disturb mode
Want your teammate to know you've seen a message but don't have time to respond yet? Pin the thread so it's at the top of your inbox and then emoji react to the message with pin so they know you've seen it and will get to it soon
You can use mentions to help get the attention of others or as a quick way to modify who is on a thread without your hands leaving your keyboard.
@mentions
notify teammates with push notifications (respects do-not-disturb)
+mentions
add a person or channel to a thread
-mentions
remove a person or channel from a thread
#mentions
link to a person or channel so you can easily share contact or channel info
Mentions work for both individuals and channels. It's just like to adding or removing people from the to, cc and bcc fields but with shorthand directly in your message.
Have an email you want to share with your team? No worries! Shortwave makes it simple no matter the situation:
⏩ Forward a thread into a channel to share a neatly displayed embedded history for easy viewing. No more crazy nested, reverse-chronological mess of messages you typically see in other email clients.
✍️ Add a channel to a thread by adding it to the to:
field or using a +
mention to loop in all its members so anyone can reply.
🔗 Copy a private link to a thread so you can reference it in a doc or add it to your task manager. The link can only be viewed by people already on the thread, so if you want to share it more widely we recommend forwarding or adding a channel to the thread first.
Check out our Shortwave 101 to learn more about best practices for inbox organization, custom notifications, and composing emails in our smart editor