Money saved is money earned 
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Oh, if weāre playing that game, every mail client I have used since The Bat! has been a disappointment. It was back in my Windows days. Excellent, excellent app that knew what email was.
I kinda feel the other way. Email has a strong expectation of being asynchronous where little else does. 90% perception, but I believe most think this way.
Except that time I came home from 2 months offshore, where I had been working on Windows NT. It took me a few days to get out of the Ctrl-Alt-Del habit! (NT = Lock the screen; OS/2 = instant reboot.)
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well if we are playing āAll time Favoriteā, my favorite all time email app was the email system on my Ravics software BBS on my Commodore 64ā¦ In 1983 it was extremely exciting to see the āYou have mailā notification on loginā¦
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My favorite was using mh along with exmh. mh is a series of small utilities that fetch mail and the prices it through a custom pipeline as a series of files. You could use anything that could edit files as a mail client.
With the widespread adoption of IMAP it didnāt really work well anymore.
My biggest gripe with modern clients is thread handling. Email has turned into pseudo-chat thread and nothing works well to integrate that format. It also doesnāt help that people top post nowā¦
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That was a good one, comparable to Mailmate.
As always, Company culture matters in this. I have coached people who ended up spending 2-4 hours a day dealing with email, this ate into the time available to do their actual job. While in some contexts thereās little pressure on email response times, in other companies there is an expectation of prompt replies no matter what the time of day.
I much prefer email as I always know what I have and havenāt finished with, but to many itās an endless stream of requests, especially in large companies.
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You are right about company culture. I previously worked in one of the top 5 investment banks in US. Whilst there is no written rule, my boss expects me to be on the blackberry on all waking hours and respond to his email within 30 minutes. He sometimes send out email 4am in the morning (perhaps he used deferred send) and I did not meet his standard.
Personally I think each communication mean has different use case. Email is great for record and achiving and to mass audience. Direct or instant messaging is good for casual chat, etc.
Joining the game, I have to put in a shout-out for Pegasus Mail, which is still in (slow) active development 33 years after its inception. Back in my PC days, thatās all I used. I still miss it.
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I set up internal only email on a NetWare server at my company in '92 and gave Pegasus Mail to my users (some of whom had never heard of email). I remember being pleasantly surprised when David Harris, the developer, responded to a question in less than 24 hours.
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The best email client Iāve ever used was The Bat!
Unfortunately - for Windows. Still actively developed. I donāt remember all features but the only mac āalternativeā I found was Airmail. But there were more and more errors so I switched to Spark. Now I found that it will be replaced by worst version 3 so now Iām not sureā¦
Ma be Thunderbird which as Iāve heard will be overhauled butā¦ I trust applications which are developed for years not for months but old fashioned complex applications are a minority now. People like simple to use attractive apps. More than one account? No way. Sofisticated features? Noooo
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Late to the party, I use SuperHuman inspite of the insane cost. It has one job, to allow me to be done fast. Everything has a shortcut.
Bonus selling point, you can do everything on the iPad with keyboard shortcuts.
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Insane is right - about US$350 per year.
I have heard others say it is brilliant, but what in your view makes it so good.
Nick
That looks like a no-go but merits consideration not for personal but for business: how many hours on oneās current salary does it mean after taxes? Can Superhuman really accelerate my work that many hours per year?
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Good observation.
For a business I agree it could very easily be justified if it saved a few hours a year. However I would (genuinely) love to know how and where it does make email triage easier. I am guessing it is really useful for someone having to triage a massive amount of email.
In of itself the price may not be that huge, but in comparison with most of what else is out there is a sustantial differential. Hey, for example - which I understand makes a huge difference to dealing with email is less than half the price.
I find it fascinating how apps are costed. I tend to view costs as multiples or fractions of Adobe Creative cloud or Office 365. So this app is half the cost of Adobe Creative Cloud (the full 20+ apps). It would take a lot to convince me that it is worth 50% of the value of adobe - or more than twice the cost of MS 365 standard for business.
But value (as opposed to cost) is subjective I guess.
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Me, too. Looks like SuperHuman might be focused on the enterprise market where high cost = amazing product to some in that market segment.
Better to start high and see what the market will pay? I guess you could always announce a sale or lower the price. 
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Another Superhuman user chiming in here.
I think sceptics would (rightfully!) be hard-pressed to name features of Superhuman that justifies the cost ā things like Inbox Splitting (basically rules-based email filtering) are easily accomplishable in other tools for free or a much lower cost.
Iām an independent consultant; Superhuman is by far the most expensive tool I pay for by myself. Does it save me a bunch of time over using, say, Mail.app with a stock configuration? For sure. Could I replicate 95% of the functionality with something like Sanebox or Spark? Totally. What makes it worth it for me isnāt actually the totally replicable time savings, but just that it is a) what Iām used to and b) joyful for me to use.
As someone who spends a huge chunk of their day in email, $350/year is a small price to pay (for me!) to make a huge part of my work smoother and more enjoyable, even if it doesnāt specifically shrink that amount of time spent over other tools.
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Thanks for the blast from the past on The Bat. I used it in the 2000s, before going Mac in 2007.
That was from a bygone pre-Slack/Messages era, when we needed to know right away when that important email came in.
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Fair point, well made.
I was really interested in what makes it worth the price, so thank you
Nick
Its greatest feature was (and I would hope still is) that it knew what email is!
I still remember when Google trumpeted āconversation viewā which was a lazy hack that ruined proper threading because everyone else followed suit.
Heck, if it werenāt for my phone, Iād be sorely tempted to shell out for Parallels to run Windows just for The Bat!. (And for those who donāt notice, the name is actually āThe Bat!ā complete with exclamation mark.)