Superhuman – the mutt’s nuts

I’ve been using email for over 25 years. I’ve tried most mail clients along the way, but the last time I was really impressed was early 2000s, when I switched to mutt. Mutt’s tagline is “All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less.”

Mutt is great because it’s fast – really fast. It is driven completely from the keyboard, and it can be extended in all sorts of clever ways. But it’s fiddly – a hacker’s mail client, with lots of settings to tweak in a configuration file – and, well, it’s all a bit Ceefax:

Eventually, mutt became too limiting. I needed a mail client which integrated with my calendar, and one which could display images and attachments within messages. So began a decade-long period of email client meh – Outlook, Apple Mail, Gmail, Google Inbox. Not bad, but not great.

Enter Superhuman, a new mail client from the team who built Rapportive. Superhuman is just… fast. Mutt fast. But not just responsive, with fast search – it has some fantastic features for people who live from their inbox and deal with lots of mail, including:

• Calendar preview as you type – typing “Fri” in a message will open a side panel to show you this Friday’s schedule
• Fast sorting mail, to archive, snooze, star or reply
• Open notifications for all email and Rapportive-like profile information on the people who message you
• “Send later” and undo for sent email
• An extremely uncluttered compose message screen, with no distractions
• Great split inbox to allow you to concentrate on the messages that matter
• Unsubscribe and archive feature, to help you rein in the mailing lists

I’ve tried to achieve and maintain inbox zero many times over the years. This is the first mail client to get me there and keep me there. So not only am I spending less time on email, the time I’m spending is more productive, and I’m finding myself much less stressed by it.

A quick word about cost

Superhuman isn’t cheap – it’s $30 which is around £23 per month. By comparison I’m paying £9 for Quickbooks, £3 for G Suite, £3 for Office 365 and £9 for Adobe Creative Cloud – so Superhuman costs me the same as all of the rest of those services together. My consultancy is small – I feel every penny of business expenses like this. And there is no free trial. To be honest, I tried it because I was curious as to what Rahul and his team had been up to, and I was surprised by the acclaim it was receiving. I thought I’d most likely cancel after the first month.

Within 48 hours of starting to use it, I was convinced. In time saved, it pays for itself many times over – and the peace of mind of knowing that I’m completely on top of my email is even more valuable.

Superhuman operates a waiting list which is currently tens of thousands of people long – but you can jump the queue with a referral from an existing user. No kickbacks or affiliate payments, just good old fashioned word of mouth recommendation. If you’re interested and would like an invite, give me a shout.

And finally…

Superhuman handles multiple email accounts but doesn’t (yet) have unified inbox. It would be really really nice if it did.