Notion Mail is a minimalist but powerful take on email

Notion is launching the third app in its suite of work tools, an email app called Notion Mail. (The other two, of course, are Notion Calendar and Notion itself.) The app, available now for web and Mac and in testing for iOS, is the next step in Notion’s attempt to compete with Microsoft Office and Google Workspace. Notion wants to be the hub for all your work, and it knows that means getting email right.

I’ve been testing Notion Mail for the last few days, and the app is roughly what I expected so far. It looks nice, trading Gmail’s countless menus and inscrutable buttons for a simple, text-first look. It’s very customizable, too: you can change what appears in your inbox and in what order, show more or less information with each message, toggle dark and light mode, and more. “We’re thinking about it from a Notion perspective,” says Jason Ginsberg, one of the leaders on the Notion Mail team. (Ginsberg and Andrew Milich founded a productivity tools company called Skiff, which was acquired by Notion last year.) 

One of Notion Mail’s most powerful features is its AI-powered organization. When you set up the app, it asks whether you’d like to automatically sort things like promotional emails or calendar invites into their own section. Useful, certainly, but so far so Gmail. When you open an email, though, a button appears at the top of the thread prompting you to “auto label similar.” If you click it, Notion’s AI will crawl through your inbox looking for other messages like it — not just matching sender or subject line, but by actually determining what’s in the email and what you might care about. You can also create a label with a chatbot-style prompt. Either way, the app presents you with some guesses, and you pick which ones should and shouldn’t be labeled together with your current thread. From then on, any new email that fits the category gets labeled automatically.

The AI labeler isn’t perfect, but it’s very handy. I clicked the button on an email containing a receipt, and Notion Mail went and found a bunch of other receipts to label, as well. (It also found a couple of unrelated emails from Chase and eBay, but those were easy enough to turn off.) Once I hit save, I was presented with a new “Payment Receipt” section in Notion Mail showing all my receipts. Well, not all: there’s no obvious way to go back in time and comb through everything, so now I have a whopping two days of receipts collated together.

Notion calls these separate sections “Views,” and they’re one of the more powerful parts of Notion Mail. “Think of each view as a collection of filters,” Milich says, “that you can combine however you want.” You could have one that combines all your confirmation emails and receipts in one mega-travel space. You could have another for all your newsletters, as well as one just for your must-reads. These views sync back to the Gmail interface as labels, and they don’t mess with the sanctity of your inbox, but they do offer a new way to put things together. It’s a little like the idea behind Google Inbox, but much less in your face.

As you start to use the app, you start to uncover more of Notion Mail’s features. (One gripe I have with the app so far: it hides a lot of what it can do, arguably for too long, in the name of simple design.) You can use Notion-style slash commands to format text, but also to insert a built-in scheduling tool connected to your calendar, or a template that can automatically add information like a Zoom link or your recipient’s first name. Notion’s AI can even write and edit your emails, if you like. You can find most things with a CMD-K shortcut to bring up the command bar, but many of them are pretty hidden otherwise.

There are some bugs and missing features in this first version. It only works with Gmail accounts, for one thing, and Milich wouldn’t give me a date for Outlook or other account support. It’s also missing Windows and all mobile platforms — there’s an iOS app coming soon, it appears, but the rest are likely to be further behind. Even beyond all that, I wish Notion Mail would let you see multiple mail accounts at once; switching between them is just annoying. I’ve seen others report attachments behaving strangely or disappearing altogether, though I haven’t had that issue myself.

In general, the app makes perfect sense for Notion. The idea, Milich says, was to “reinvent the core idea of the inbox. It’s not this never-ending list. It’s a database you can filter, sort, organize, in the Notion building-block model. It’s like an app you can customize.” It’s not a complete reinvention of the whole email system, just a bunch of new ways to interact with and make sense of everything in that system. That idea has worked awfully well for Notion as a whole, and works for my inbox so far too.