Shortwave vs Abnormal AI (formerly Abnormal - Cloud Email Security)

Shortwave is an AI email client built by former Google engineers that wraps Gmail with inbox organization tools and an agent you can prompt to search, write, schedule, and filter mail. It runs on iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows and syncs with Gmail accounts. The app positions itself as a spiritual successor to Google Inbox, with bundles, splits, and keyboard shortcuts at the center of daily triage.

Most Gmail add-ons bolt on one feature. Shortwave treats the whole inbox as a workflow surface: you triage with bundles and todos first, then ask the agent to draft replies, run natural language search across years of mail, or spin up filters written in plain English. That combo of Inbox-style organization plus a prompt-driven assistant sets it apart from Superhuman-style speed clients and basic AI summarizers.

Sales reps, founders, and support leads use it to split high-priority threads, track read receipts, and share live threads with teammates without pasting screenshots into Slack. Teams on Gmail who miss Inbox bundles or want calendar-aware scheduling from inside mail tend to stick with it once they adopt the Shortwave Method triage flow.

Abnormal AI stops email, identity, AI, and insider threats by learning what normal communication looks like across your organization. Its Attune foundation model builds per-identity baselines for people, vendors, and relationships, then catches business email compromise, vendor fraud, account takeover, and AI-crafted phishing that slip past signature-based gateways. More than 4,500 organizations use it, including over 25% of the Fortune 500.

Where most email tools rely on known threat feeds or generic LLM classifiers, Abnormal trains purpose-built behavioral models on production attack data. In an internal benchmark against GPT-4.1 and Gemini 3.5 Flash, it logged 46?? fewer missed attacks and 60?? fewer false positives on human-confirmed samples.

Security teams at large enterprises deploy Abnormal through cloud APIs to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace in about 60 seconds with no MX record changes. The platform spans inbound email security, messaging protection for Slack and Teams, identity threat defense, AI tool governance, and infiltration prevention. Unlike general-purpose LLM email classifiers, it delivers signal-level reasoning behind each detection instead of opaque block-or-allow verdicts.