Last October, we reported that Notion was working on an AI-powered email client to take on Gmail and the rest of the increasingly bloated inbox scene. Now it’s here, officially called Notion Mail, and it’s rolling out first on macOS, with an iOS app in the pipeline. Android’s coming "soon," at least according to the product's FAQ.
So what’s the pitch? Notion Mail isn’t trying to replace Gmail itself but acts more like a reimagined front-end, built to give users a different kind of email experience.
It connects directly to Gmail accounts, but instead of just layering a chatbot over your inbox like most AI tools do, it's aiming for something deeper by letting users use AI to build a custom inbox that's organized and set up the way they prefer.
Jason Ginsberg, an engineer who worked on Notion Mail, explained the following to TechCrunch:
The way we built Notion Mail is almost down to the building blocks, or the fundamentals of how email works. It’s really modular. And what that means is, like, instead of just going to settings and there’s just what we’ve decided, you actually can configure Notion Mail in ways we can’t even imagine, all different permutations, so that it actually works the way you prefer.
That level of customization is meant to feel more like how Notion operates with pages and databases: flexible, user-defined, and highly integrated. Notion Mail plays nicely with the company’s other tools, like Notion Calendar. It can even suggest meeting times based on your availability if someone proposes a call in an email thread. The email gets parsed, the calendar gets checked, and a smart reply gets teed up, all without leaving the app.
The core AI features are free (within monthly usage limits), but unlimited use requires a paid plan. No surprise there.
One of the more interesting features is the ability to create "views," essentially smart folders powered by AI that label and sort incoming messages based on topic. Other features include:
- AI-powered automatic email labeling and sorting by topic, sender, or label
- Quick replies and smart auto-drafting of responses
- Reusable email templates through snippets
- AI-powered writing improvements for tone and clarity
- AI-powered meeting scheduling based on calendar availability
- Intelligent filtering to separate important emails from less relevant ones
For now, Notion Mail is English-only, but the company says that won’t last long:
Notion Mail is currently available in English. We will support an additional 13 languages (just like Notion!) very soon.
It is still the early days for this thing, and it doesn’t support multiple inboxes in one view just yet, something the team says is on the roadmap. Mozilla is also planning its own Gmail challenger with Thundermail, part of the upcoming Thunderbird Pro suite, which, among others, offers users custom email addresses such as @thundermail.com and @tb.pro.
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