Parity with email
What Superhuman unlocks beyond plain email, and what plain email still has.
Superhuman inherits the plain-email agent but runs it against richer inbound context and a different outbound channel. Here's what the switch buys you and what it still lacks.
What Superhuman unlocks beyond plain email:
- Full thread plus comment history, every turn. Plain email only sees the one incoming message and its attachments. Sauna on Superhuman sees every email in the conversation and every prior comment, refreshed on every reply.
- Observer-only context. Other Sauna users commenting on the same thread reach Sauna as read-only context without starting their own sessions.
- Reply lives inside the UI. The reply is a comment in the Superhuman thread, visible to everyone who shares the thread. Plain email replies by sending a new email.
- Inline pingback. The flagger gets
@mentioned on every reply so their Superhuman notifications fire. - Parallel sessions per thread. Several Sauna users can work the same thread without colliding.
What plain email has that Superhuman doesn't (yet):
- No attachment ingestion. Plain email uploads attachments to the session; Superhuman hands the agent text only.
- No recipient-role routing. Plain email branches on whether you were direct / cc / bcc / forwarded. Superhuman doesn't.
- No email-header threading. Plain email stitches replies via standard email headers. Superhuman keys on the thread + user pairing instead.
- No error reply on failure. Plain email sends a follow-up email if something breaks. On Superhuman a failure is silent.
- Connect-account link goes to email, not to the thread. If Sauna needs you to connect an app mid-session, the link is emailed to the commenter rather than posted as a comment in Superhuman.
- No scheduled-task email template path. Plain email has template handling for scheduled runs; Superhuman doesn't.
