Swingmail unifies Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter, makes an inbox of your top 15 contacts

Swingmail purports to be a solution for people juggling numerous professional and personal projects and contacts at once. The app can integrate Gmail or iCloud email accounts along with Twitter and Facebook and create messaging threads that include all the correspondence a user has with another individual across all three services. A simple swipe enables calling. Its natural language processing capabilities then shrink the modified inbox down to just the 15 most essential contacts in your life.

The app determines those contacts by peeking at who you are corresponding with and the content of those conversations. Anyone who you had consistent interactions with the previous week – or will be talking with frequently in the week ahead – gets prioritized.

In that sense, Swingmail does not replace the traditional inbox. It does, however, simplify project (and life) management for people who don’t want to go hunting through various apps to tie up different conversations with the same person. Parents who want to track every digital moment shared with their children are sure to rejoice.

Factors that the app considers in ranking your contacts are your location, communication frequency with the person, the date, and the details of event invitations. When you want to respond, simply open up the conversation in the app and send a reply using any one of your linked accounts.

Swingmail launched in America in the middle of January. Today the iOS-only app goes global, entering Singapore, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, India, and the Philippines.

Japanese made…and coming to Japan

BHI, founded by Yasuhiro Himukashi and Hirokazu Yoshinaga, provides Swingmail, but the Japanese company has not yet launched a localized version in its native country. “Email and SNS are integral to daily communication and the platforms supporting them are mainly US majors like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. We wanted feedback from the influential English speaking community on how they perceived our app and its philosophy towards communication. It would have been easier to just start in Japan, but going from a local product to a global one is difficult afterwards,” Himukashi explains.

In 2014, the team did several beta tests around the world, including in Japan. During that time it was named the best new app on the App Store in Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. By the end of February, a Japanese-language Swingmail will be available for Japanese users.

It has taken nearly two years for the team to get this point. Samurai Incubate had accepted BHI back in spring 2013 and gave some seed funding. The product showed enough promise that it scored JPY 200 million (US$2 million) in April 2014 from Daiwa PI Partners. Koichiro Tsujino, a former president of Google Japan, played an advisory role in honing the product.

The early adopters from the first month of release have been showing some interest in sticking around. “Right now, we’ve seen our first 10,000 downloads, and are steadily growing. We expect to reach our first 100,000 downloads before our Japan launch. At this time, we are seeing around 30 percent of these becoming monthly active users,” Himukashi says.

After selecting a conversation, you will see all the messages sent to that person across multiple services. One swipe later, and you can send a reply.