How to Switch From Superhuman to Another Email Client: What Moves and What Doesn't

If you are working out how to switch from Superhuman to another email client, start with the reassuring part: your mailbox does not move. Superhuman Mail is a front end over Gmail and Outlook, so your messages, your archive and your address stay with your provider. Leaving is a disconnect, not a migration.

What is genuinely at risk sits on Superhuman's side of that line: snippets, splits, reminders, team comments, read statuses and shortcut muscle memory. A little of it exports. Most is a rebuild, and knowing which is which is the job.

One disclosure: we build AI Emaily, one of the places people land after leaving. This is the mechanics of moving, not the ranking our Superhuman alternatives roundup covers. Superhuman is a good product, an acquisition is not a scandal, and there is a section below on when staying is right.

Does your email move when you leave Superhuman? No#

Superhuman Mail authenticates to Google or Microsoft over OAuth and works on the mailbox those providers already hold. Its own documentation describes your inbox as stored on your machine rather than on Superhuman's servers.

So there is no export file, no forwarding window and no address to announce. Open Gmail or Outlook the day after you cancel and the last five years sit exactly where you left them. That is the difference between leaving a client and leaving a mail service that is shutting down.

What you actually lose: the Superhuman layer#

Everything that made the inbox feel like yours was built above the mailbox, and very little of it exports. Treat the table below as a copy-out job and do it while you still have access — every item in the right column becomes impossible the moment the subscription ends.

Which of those losses actually hurt#

Snippets hurt most: you wrote them and you use them daily. A recruiter with forty snippets is facing an afternoon of copy-and-paste, and the only wrong move is discovering that after cancelling.

Splits are the easiest win. A split is a saved query, so once the strings are written down they become filters or views in minutes each. Copy the strings, not the concept.

Team comments are the item you cannot reconstruct. That discussion was never visible to external recipients and never became part of the message, so it is not sitting in Gmail waiting for you.

The 30-minute pre-switch audit#

Do this in one sitting, with Superhuman still open, before you touch a billing page. None of it is reversible later.

• Paste every snippet, private and team, into one document with its shortcut name.
• Write down each split and the exact query behind it.
• Open the Reminders view and list each pending follow-up with its date and who it chases.
• Scan scheduled sends and decide, per message: send now or reschedule elsewhere.
• Copy any thread where the real decision lives in a team comment rather than the email.
• Copy your signature block, including the HTML, since it is stored in Superhuman and not in Gmail.
• Note your read-status habits honestly. If you time follow-ups off opens, confirm the destination offers something equivalent.

How to switch without downtime#

The mailbox not moving is what makes a parallel run possible. Two clients can hold the same account at once, and a week of overlap separates a calm switch from a panicked one.

1. 1

   Name the reason you are leaving

   Cost, multi-provider coverage, wanting the AI to do more, or a team change. The reason picks the destination, and tells you whether to leave at all.

2. 2

   Run the pre-switch audit

   Copy out the snippets, splits, reminders, scheduled sends, comments and signature above. Thirty minutes, and the only irreversible part of the process.

3. 3

   Connect the new client alongside Superhuman

   Add the same Gmail or Outlook account in the new client. Both connect over OAuth to one mailbox, so nothing is duplicated or moved.

4. 4

   Run both for a full week

   Work in the new client and keep Superhuman open as the safety net. A week covers a Monday backlog and a Friday scramble; a weekend does not.

5. 5

   Rebuild the layer

   Snippets become templates, splits become filters or views, reminders become follow-ups. Rebuild only what you used last month, which is far less than you saved.

6. 6

   Cancel, then revoke access

   Cancel the subscription, then remove Superhuman from your Google or Microsoft account permissions. Ending billing and revoking a mailbox connection are separate actions.

Cancelling cleanly, and what happens to a team seat mid-term#

For an individual it is self-serve: open the Subscription page and use the cancel option at the bottom. Cancelling generally stops the next charge rather than cutting you off that day, and the page shows when access ends — which makes the tail of a paid period the ideal parallel-run window.

Teams work differently, and this is where people get caught. A member's cancellation runs through the admin, or through billing support in the command palette so the team removes the seat. Admins remove members from the Admin Portal, reached via Manage Team.

Seat changes mid-term are a billing question, not a product one. Superhuman documents added seats being prorated for the rest of the period, with the next invoice reflecting the new count. Whether a removed seat is credited depends on your plan, and contracted teams follow the contract rather than the self-serve flow.

Where people go next#

Where you land depends on the reason you named in step one. This is a shortlist for migrators, not a ranking — our Superhuman alternatives roundup does the full comparison.

AI Emaily is the option we build, and the one we recommend for people leaving over cost or provider coverage. It connects Gmail, Microsoft 365 and Outlook, and standard IMAP accounts, into one inbox, so an old domain mailbox Superhuman could not open stops being a separate app. Nothing migrates when you connect it, exactly as nothing migrated when you connected Superhuman.

The structural difference is what the AI may do. Three authority levels are set per account: Manual is a plain fast client, Copilot triages, files and drafts while nothing sends without your approval, and Autopilot is gated with an undo window and an audit log recording each action and its reason. Drafting voice comes from a Personal Context brain and per-client profiles you write and edit — we do not train on your mail, and model providers run under zero-retention terms.

The limits, plainly. Our macOS app is Apple Silicon only and not in the Mac App Store; it and the Windows app are an Electron shell around the web app rather than a native binary, so a native client beats us on memory footprint and OS integration. There is no Linux build, Android is a PWA with a native app on the roadmap, and offline is partial by design.

The other honest destinations: Shortwave if every account you own is Gmail, Mimestream for native Mac speed with no agent, and Fyxer if the appeal is changing nothing at all. Check capability and plans on each vendor's own site.

The case for staying on Superhuman#

Leaving over a renewal price, or because half your accounts sit outside Gmail and Outlook, is a sound reason. Leaving because an acquisition made you nervous is not, on its own — Superhuman Mail is still shipping, and your mailbox was never theirs to lose.

The test is narrow: why did you subscribe? If it was speed and keyboard fluency, and you still process everything by hand, staying is rational and switching costs years of muscle memory for no gain. If you expected the assistant to take work off you and that now sits in a tier you are not on, look above.

The rollback, if it does not work out#

Rollback is the quiet advantage of a client that sits on your provider's mailbox: nothing you did in the new app damaged anything, so going back means resubscribing and reconnecting the same account. The only thing you cannot roll back is the layer you never copied out, which is why the audit comes first.