Notion Unveils AI-Powered Email Client: Notion Mail Set to Revolutionize Inbox Management

Notion wants to change your notion of emails with new email app

Notion Mail would let you customize your inbox with views and use Notion AI for various tasks. Productivity platform Notion is used for many things, but most people use it to organize their unorganized thoughts. It's great at what it does, but the platform has higher aspirations. After revolutionizing productivity apps, Notion wants to take on the best email apps by challenging the very notion of what an email app is and what it does and rebuilding it from that point. At its Make with Notion event, Notion has announced Notion Mail, its new email app coming next year. With the help of "views," Notion Mail lets you customize your inbox according to your workflows, breaking free from the rigidity of the traditional email inbox. You can keep your inbox organized with simple prompts to help you archive and even draft emails, and you can let AI handle your scheduling and follow-ups with automatic replies. If you'd like more AI help, you can create one-click snippets to send AI-suggested personalized emails. The app would integrate with Notion Calendar, so scheduling meetings would be fairly easy as you can avoid conflicts from within the mail app. There aren't more details on the rest of the experience, so we will have to wait until early 2025 to find out. Notion says Notion Mail will integrate with Google and Gmail accounts at launch and be available on iPhones and Android, too. If Notion Mail sounds exciting, you can join the waitlist to get an early preview.

Notion is making a super customizable email app

After taking on calendar apps earlier this year, Notion is ready to tackle emails with a fully customizable app launching next year. Much like Notion's other tools, the company says Mail will "distill email down to its building blocks," allowing you to create an inbox with views, layouts, and actions tailored to your preferences. You can also use Notion AI to automatically organize, archive, or draft emails based on a prompt. Its AI can schedule meetings for you through integration with Notion's Calendar app, as well as help you quickly write personalized emails using "one-click snippets." The Mail app bears some resemblance to Skiff, the secure email service Notion acquired in February. Notion plans on launching its Mail app in "early 2025," and it will integrate with Google and Gmail accounts at launch. It will also be available on iPhone and Android devices. The Notion Mail app is currently in preview, but you can join the waitlist to gain access from Notion's website. In addition to a new Mail app, Notion launched a new Forms tool that you can use to collect responses, much like Google Forms. Notion is also rolling out more ways to customize layouts and new automation that will let you notify people via Gmail. Notion launched an update to its marketplace as well, where people can sell and shop for Notion templates. As my colleague David Pierce noted earlier this year, Notion wants to become the one and only productivity app that a company needs to accomplish all its tasks. Now that it's going after emails, maybe a presentation app really is next.

Notion is coming for Gmail with new email client powered by AI

In context: Because email is so public, many users receive scores of emails daily, making it difficult to focus on what matters. Google attempted to address this with Inbox by Gmail, but that was later discontinued. Other email clients like Spark have continued to innovate in this area. Now, Notion, a growing productivity platform, aims to "reimagine" email with a new client that promises to automate many tasks that typically give users a headache. The new service, dubbed Notion Email, isn't available quite yet - the company is operating a waitlist for initial access, which is expected in early 2025. But the team has detailed what to expect when it does arrive. At its core, Notion Email looks to be centered around customization and personalization powered by AI. The company says that the client is "built for speed" with support for nifty shortcuts (much like Notion's other apps) and quick replies. "Instead of wading through a storm surge of messages, email should feel like a trusty rudder that helps you navigate the currents of work - job applications, project updates, upcoming meetings," notes Notion. As for features, first up is something called "Views." This will allow users to slice and dice their inbox into sections tailored for different purposes. The company gave an example that if, say, you're trying to hire someone, Notion Email would automatically cluster those emails into a "Recruiting" view and reserve another view for project updates and customer support. These views will display in a sidebar to the left, just like the Notion web app for notes and documents. Of course, new software isn't complete these days without a dash of generative AI. Another headlining feature with the client is the ability to use textual prompts to organize, archive, and draft emails. A second AI capability helps you draft emails and responses. Notion showed off a neat use case that could work well for job hunters: the AI can automatically draft emails to nudge unresponsive threads until you get a reply. This could be clutch for anyone ghosted by HR after applying in this brutal job market. Lastly, a "one-click snippets" feature will let users rapidly spin up templated responses. At launch in early 2025, the new email service will integrate with existing Gmail and Google accounts. And from what we can tell, it will first arrive as a web app followed by iPhone and Android apps.

Here is Notion's email client | TechCrunch

Notion, as my colleagues at TechCrunch scooped earlier Thursday, is announcing an email client at its first "Make with Notion" user conference. For now, Notion Mail is in preview, and at least for the time being, it's more of a Gmail client than a traditional email service. The idea here, Notion says, is to build an email experience that allows users "to ditch the old ways of a rigid inbox and embrace a new way: where email works for you and your workflows." When exactly Notion Mail will launch, though, is still a question mark. The company is only committing to "soon" at this point, but there is a waitlist for getting early access. With adding Mail, Notion continues on its path to offering a more fully featured suite of productivity options. The launch of Notion Mail, after all, comes only a few months after the company launched its Calendar product. Notion Calendar, it's worth noting, was the product of an acquisition, with the company buying calendar app Cron in 2022. Similarly, Notion recently acquired Skiff, a security-centric platform that also included an end-to-end encrypted email service. It doesn't come as a surprise, then, that Notion Mail is taking some design cues from Skiff, but the company's focus here isn't so much on security (though I'm sure that's top of mind for Notion as well) but an integration with Notion AI. There seem to be two parts to the AI integration here: automatically organizing your emails by using an AI prompt as a kind of smart filtering mechanism, as well as the ability to let "Notion AI handle the tedious back-and-forth such as scheduling and follow-ups," the company said. How well that works in practice remains to be seen. One nice feature Notion Mail will offer that I often wish Gmail would is that it doesn't just allow for using different filters, but also allows you to prioritize emails inside of those filtered views. Gmail, on the other hand, only offers the "priority inbox" view in the main inbox, but when you drill down to any of its default categories like forums, updates, or social, your only option is a reverse timeline view. Another integration worth highlighting is with Notion Calendar. Users will be able to add a scheduling button to their emails that links them right to their calendars and availability. In addition to Mail, Notion is also launching a number of other new features. These include Notion Forms, which lets users design forms and collect information, with Notion as the database backing it, as well as the ability to more easily customize layouts in Notion to better suit a user's preference for how to display tasks, notes, docs, and more. Notion is also launching some improved automation features, including the ability to connect Notion and Gmail to, for example, notify people via Gmail. And, to round all of this out, Notion has updates it Marketplace with a redesigned web experience.

The most promising new email app I've seen in years

Still, spending a few days with the preview edition greatly whetted my appetite for what's coming. Notion Mail is the first big new idea in email since 2020's Hey, which remains my primary client for the time being. Overall, it bears a close familial resemblance to Notion's namesake product. At first blush, that app looks like a notetaker akin to Evernote, and you can certainly use it that way. But Notion's ultra-flexible templates can turn it into a social-media scheduling system, a meal planner, an attendance tracker, or practically anything you or someone else can dream up. Software does not get much more flexible than this. Notion Mail isn't there yet: It's starting out with 17 templates compared to Notion's 20,000-plus, and there are limits to how radically you can rework the standard interface. Already, though, you can create new views that organize your inbox via principles other than strict reverse-chronological order, such as by sender, label, or read status. You also have some control over the columns of information that appear in a view, allowing you to strip it down to a minimalist view. Or, if information density is your thing, you can add even more elements. The app also has Autopilots, which are AI-powered rules that let you sort mail using prompts such as "Show only emails that relate to recruiting." As in the main Notion app, there are canned elements called snippets that can include data fields, allowing you to insert typical email elements such as Zoom invites without typing the whole thing every time. You can insert a scheduling button -- Notion launched a calendar app in January -- rather than devote a whole email thread to the rigmarole of coordinating a day and time. Inevitably, it's possible to draft emails using AI, an option I haven't yet delved into because I'm dreading the day it might seem reasonable to me.