I've been using Shortwave in Alpha for about five months and I think you're reacting far too strongly to one line in the blog post. The product does a bunch of things that encourage an Inbox-zero workflow. Emails are organized as a to-do list, and the archive feature is way more prominent than in Gmail, so the most natural workflow is to go down your inbox and check things off. Most of the organization described happens automatically. And the organization helps getting to zero - all of the confluence notifications I get, for instance, are grouped in a single thread and I can scan and archive them quickly.

I get to inbox zero 2-3 times a week, and that wasn't happening before when I was using the Gmail client.

> I need systems that make it easy to extract the relevant informations from them, and put the result in one central organized place for action, and another one for archive. A system that filters noise, and get me in control. That's it.

Yes! In my experience Shortwave is better at this than the client I was using previously. I think it actually addresses some of your issues with email.