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Notion killing Skiff-influenced email app since most users use AI agents instead
In February 2024, Notion bought Skiff, an encrypted email and productivity software startup. Within a year, Notion shut down Skiff's email service (taking @skiff.com email addresses with it). And in April 2025, the San Francisco-based company released Notion Mail, a Gmail client primarily built by people who joined Notion through the Skiff acquisition. Today, Notion announced that it's shutting down Notion Mail, effectively killing what little remained of Skiff email. In an X post (first spotted by 9to5Mac) today, Notion said that it will shutter the Notion Mail "inbox across web, desktop, and iOS on September 22." The post claimed that most Notion users don't use email clients anyway and instead rely on AI agents to handle their electronic correspondence. It reads: We launched Notion Mail with a belief that your inbox should think like you -- more personal to how you work and over time, more capable with AI. As Notion agents have gotten more capable, we've seen more users hand off email workflows to them. Today, more than half of Notion Mail users manage emails without ever opening their inbox. So, we're going all in on using agents to run your inbox. Notion noted that most user data will stay in Gmail. A support page reads: "When the Notion Mail inbox shuts down, your email history will stay exactly where it is in Gmail." However, Notion urged users to export drafts and scheduled emails by September 21, since those won't automatically carry over to an alternative app. Notion noted that users can also save their Notion Mail setups and "export your snippets and auto label instructions to use elsewhere." "If you have auto label set up in Notion Mail, you won't have to rebuild it. Create a Custom Agent in a few clicks, and we'll bring your existing rules over for you," the X post explained. "And if you're already running Notion agents to manage email, they'll continue running. Your email connection in Notion stays in place." Organizations that relied on Notion Mail in a regulated environment might have to transition from Notion Mail earlier. "If you rely on HIPAA coverage, you should plan to transition off Notion Mail by June 30, 2026," Notion's support page reads. Skiff reportedly served 2 million users, giving rivals like Proton Mail a run for their money before the Notion acquisition. As a Gmail client that didn't support end-to-end encryption, Notion's approach to email lacked the privacy focus that Skiff carried as an email provider. Still, Notion Mail was built with Skiff's infrastructure and by former Skiff executives, making its impending demise feel like a sort of swan song for Skiff. Although Notion is killing its Skiff-influenced email client, it may continue leveraging the human resources and other productivity ideas (around calendars and storage, for instance) gained through its Skiff acquisition as it tries to compete more strongly against rivals like Google Workspace. Notion, however, has strayed from releasing direct follow-up products to Skiff's portfolio.
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Notion Mail shuts down amid agent takeover
Productivity company Notion is shutting down its email product, Notion Mail, on September 22. The company said it is discontinuing its email inbox in favor of its AI agent offering. It noted that users were increasingly handing over reins of their email to the agents, and not opening their inbox at all. "As Notion agents have gotten more capable, we've seen more users hand off email workflows to them. Today, more than half of Notion Mail users manage emails without ever opening their inbox. So, we're going all in on using agents to run your inbox," the company said in a post on X. Notion Mail is connected with Gmail, meaning all emails in the inbox will stay intact. However, users will need to export drafts and scheduled emails if they want to keep them. The company said that users can export snippets and auto-label instructions and use them elsewhere and emphasized that Notion's email-based agents will keep working post-Notion Mail shutdown. Notion announced its email product in preview mode in 2024 after it acquired security-centric productivity startup Skiff. The company aimed to integrate email with Notion AI with features like auto-labeling, filtering, and handling scheduling for users. The company made the product available to users in April 2025 to better compete with the likes of Superhuman and Fyxer. Newer startups like AgentMail are in step with Notion's thesis and are trying to build an email service specifically for agents.
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Notion is axing Notion Mail because half its users never actually used it
* AI Agents did the work: over half of Notion Mail users never opened the app because agents managed their inboxes instead. * Notion will shut down Notion Mail across web, desktop, and iOS on Sept 22; agents or Gmail can manage email. * AI moves fast: agentic automation is making traditional app UIs redundant. If there's one thing I've learned about the AI scene, it's that it moves incredibly fast. One year's innovation becomes the next year's dead weight, and we're seeing models like Claude getting major updates every month or two. Back in April 2025, we caught wind that Notion was releasing a client called Notion Mail, which acted as a frontend for Gmail. The idea was that Notion Mail would show you all your emails, and you could either perform in-mail actions yourself or ask your agents to do them for you. Well, it turns out that over half of Notion Mail's users didn't actually use Notion Mail, so Notion is making the decision to trim the fat. Notion Mail is getting the axe as agentic emailing evolves People just weren't using it anymore So, how do half the users of Notion Mail end up not actually using Notion Mail? Well, it's part of a larger Notion package that gives people the power to automate elements of their workflow with their AI agents. The original idea that shipped Notion Mail was that it gave you a frontend for Gmail, through which you could enhance your actions with AI. Well, it turns out the agents did such a good job that over half of Notion Mail's users didn't open the app; they just sicced their AI agents onto their inbox instead. As such, Notion was pouring a lot of love and care into maintaining the Mail app, where most of its users didn't even bother opening it. So, the solution was pretty obvious: get rid of Notion Mail entirely. As announced on X, Notion Mail will be removed on September 22nd, but people can still use their AI agents to manage their inbox via Notion. If users want to do something themselves, they can open Gmail in their browser. However, it made zero sense for Notion Mail to exist when the AI agents essentially made the 'human side' of the service obsolete. If you're a Notion Mail user, the company explains in its FAQ that your inbox will stay the same on September 22nd. However, any drafts or scheduled emails you made through Notion Mail will vanish, so be sure to export them or send them by September 21st. And if you have an auto label set up in Notion Mail, the company says you can save them to Notion, then use an agent to apply similar labelling. I ditched Google Calendar for Notion Calendar, and it changed everything Google Calendar who? Posts 1 By Mahnoor Faisal
[4]
Notion Mail is shutting down - Engadget
Notion Mail is shutting down It's doubling down on agentic AI for your inbox instead. Notion announced that it will shut down its email client later this year. Notion Mail will wind down across web, mobile and desktop platforms on September 22. It has published an FAQ for users to make sure that they don't lose any messages or data in the transition. Most emails will still exist in a Gmail inbox, but customers will need to manually export their drafts, scheduled emails, snippets and auto label instructions. The company isn't giving up on email entirely. "As Notion agents have gotten more capable, we've seen more users hand off email workflows to them," the company said in an X post about the change in strategy. "Today, more than half of Notion Mail users manage emails without ever opening their inbox. So, we're going all in on using agents to run your inbox." Notion offers a solid suite of productivity tools. It began offering Notion Mail after acquiring startup Skiff in 2024.
[5]
Notion Mail shuts down as AI agents make the traditional inbox obsolete
Notion kills Notion Mail on September 22, saying AI agents have made the traditional inbox redundant for most users. Notion is shutting down Notion Mail on September 22, less than 18 months after making the email product available to users. The company said the decision reflects a broader shift in how people interact with email, with AI agents increasingly handling triage, responses, and scheduling without requiring anyone to open an inbox. More than half of Notion Mail's users manage their email without ever opening the inbox view, according to a post the company published on X. That statistic became the thesis for the shutdown. If most users are already letting AI handle the work, building and maintaining a standalone email client is solving a problem that is disappearing. Notion Mail connected with Gmail, and the company says emails will remain intact in users' Google accounts after the product goes offline. Users who created drafts or scheduled emails within Notion Mail will need to export those manually before September 22. Notion published a help center guide with step-by-step instructions for the transition. The product had a short and turbulent life. Notion acquired the privacy-focused email and collaboration startup Skiff in February 2024, bringing in the team and technology that would become Notion Mail. The company previewed the email client in October 2024, made it generally available on April 15, 2025, and barely a year later is winding it down. The timing aligns with Notion's pivot toward AI agents as its core product direction. On May 13, the company launched a developer platform that lets third parties build AI agents on top of Notion's workspace. Notion says its customers have already built more than one million agents on the platform, a figure that underscores how quickly agent adoption is moving inside the company's ecosystem. Notion is not alone in treating email as a problem for agents rather than humans. AgentMail raised six million dollars in seed funding earlier this year to give AI agents their own email inboxes, arguing that email is the identity layer of the internet and that the next wave of users will be autonomous software, not people. The startup already counts hundreds of thousands of agent users. The broader pattern is visible across SaaS, where Asana acquired no-code agent builder Stack AI for 75 million dollars in May to add cross-system workflow execution. Salesforce has rebuilt Slackbot into what it calls an agentic operating system, with more than 30 new AI capabilities launched in March. Productivity companies are racing to reposition around agents before agents make their existing products redundant. For Notion, killing the email client is a bet that building infrastructure for agents is more valuable than building interfaces for humans. The company's developer platform supports agents that can read, write, and act across Notion workspaces, handling the kind of cross-application coordination that email was originally designed to facilitate. The decision carries risk. Notion Mail was a differentiator in a crowded productivity market, and removing it narrows the product's surface area at a moment when competitors are expanding theirs. But the company appears to have concluded that maintaining an email client is a distraction from the agent platform that will define its next chapter. Users who rely on Notion Mail have three months to adjust. The email product will stop functioning on September 22, and Notion has not indicated any plans to replace it with an alternative. The inbox, in Notion's view, has already been replaced, by software that never needs to open one.
[6]
Notion shutting down its AI-powered email client, including Mac and iOS apps
Last year, Notion expanded its productivity suite to include Notion Mail, an AI-powered email client. Today, the company announced that it's shutting down the Notion Mail inbox service this fall. Notion Mail will stop working on September 22 Notion is primarily a notes and tasks platform with AI features included. In addition to the flagship Notion app, the company also offers Notion Calendar, Notion Mail, and Notion Web Clipper. But later this year, Notion Mail is going away. The service only launched in April 2025, but it will be discontinued later this year on September 22. Here's the statement from Notion, which explains why it's shutting down Notion Mail this fall: We're winding down the Notion Mail inbox across web, desktop, and iOS on September 22. We launched Notion Mail with a belief that your inbox should think like you -- more personal to how you work and over time, more capable with AI. As Notion agents have gotten more capable, we've seen more users hand off email workflows to them. Today, more than half of Notion Mail users manage emails without ever opening their inbox. So, we're going all in on using agents to run your inbox. We're grateful to each and every one of you for building your routine around Notion Mail and trusting us with something that mattered as much as your email. More to come! The company provides three dates in a help article that goes into more detail about the upcoming shutdown: * Starting June 25: Export your Notion Mail-only data through the app or on web. * September 21: Last day to save anything you want to keep. * September 22: Notion Mail shuts down. Any data you haven't saved will be permanently deleted. You can learn more about Notion Mail being discontinued here. For now, you can still download Notion Mail from the App Store before it goes away.
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Notion is discontinuing Notion Mail on September 22, less than 18 months after launch. The company says more than half its users now manage email entirely through AI agents without ever opening their inbox. The decision signals a broader industry shift toward agent-based workflows that make traditional email interfaces redundant.
Notion announced it will shut down Notion Mail across web, desktop, and iOS on September 22, ending a product that barely lasted 18 months since its general availability launch in April 2025
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. The email client shutdown reflects a dramatic shift in user behavior, with the company revealing that more than half of Notion Mail users manage emails without ever opening their inbox3
. Instead, these users rely entirely on AI agents to handle email workflows, from triage to responses and scheduling.
Source: Engadget
The decision to kill the email client represents Notion's strategic pivot toward agent-based email management rather than maintaining traditional inbox interfaces. "As Notion agents have gotten more capable, we've seen more users hand off email workflows to them," the company stated in an X post announcing the change
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. The San Francisco-based productivity company is now going all in on using AI agents to run inboxes, treating email as a problem for autonomous software rather than humans.Notion Mail had a turbulent history from the start. Notion acquired Skiff, a privacy-focused email and productivity startup serving 2 million users, in February 2024
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. Within a year, the company shut down Skiff's encrypted email service, taking @skiff.com email addresses with it. Notion Mail was primarily built by people who joined through the Skiff acquisition, using Skiff's infrastructure and former executives' expertise.
Source: TechCrunch
The product was previewed in October 2024, made generally available on April 15, 2025, and is now being discontinued just over a year later
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. As a Gmail integration that lacked the end-to-end encryption Skiff championed, Notion Mail represented a departure from Skiff's privacy-first approach. The impending shutdown feels like a final chapter for what remained of Skiff's email legacy.Most user data will remain intact since Notion Mail connected with Gmail. "When the Notion Mail inbox shuts down, your email history will stay exactly where it is in Gmail," according to Notion's support page
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. However, users must take action before September 21 to avoid losing certain data. Drafts and scheduled emails won't automatically carry over to alternative apps and need manual export4
.Users can also export snippets and auto label instructions to use elsewhere. For those already using auto label features, Notion offers a streamlined transition: "Create a Custom Agent in a few clicks, and we'll bring your existing rules over for you," the company explained
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. AI agents managing email through Notion will continue running post-shutdown, as the email connection in Notion stays in place. Organizations relying on HIPAA coverage face an earlier deadline and should plan to transition off Notion Mail by June 30, 20261
.The Notion Mail shutdown illuminates how AI-driven automation is making traditional app UIs redundant
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. When over half your users never open the product because AI agents handle everything, maintaining the interface becomes wasteful. This user behavior shift is pushing productivity companies to rethink their entire product strategies.Notion launched a developer platform on May 13 that lets third parties build AI agents on top of its workspace. The company reports customers have already built more than one million agents on the platform
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. This rapid adoption underscores how quickly agent-based workflows are becoming central to Notion's ecosystem. The company is betting that building infrastructure for AI agents delivers more value than building interfaces for humans.Notion isn't alone in this pivot. Newer startups like AgentMail raised six million dollars in seed funding to give AI agents their own email inboxes, arguing that the next wave of email users will be autonomous software rather than people
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. The startup already counts hundreds of thousands of agent users. Meanwhile, competitors like Superhuman and Fyxer continue offering AI-enhanced workflows within traditional email interfaces2
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Source: XDA-Developers
Broader SaaS patterns reveal similar movements. Asana acquired no-code agent builder Stack AI for 75 million dollars in May to add cross-system workflow execution. Salesforce rebuilt Slackbot into what it calls an agentic operating system, launching more than 30 new AI capabilities in March
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. Productivity companies are racing to reposition around AI-driven productivity tools before agents make their existing products obsolete.For Notion, killing the email client narrows its product surface area at a moment when rivals like Google Workspace are expanding theirs. But the company appears convinced that maintaining an email client distracts from the agent platform that will define its future. The inbox, in Notion's view, has already been replaced by software that never needs to open one
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