Notion Mail Takes You Back to When Gmail Was Good

Notion Mail is finally out in the wild, for anyone who has a Gmail account. And it’s quintessential Notion. If you’ve used the standard Notion app, you really can’t confuse it for anything else.

Notion Mail is a minimalist and text-based take on the Mail app that isn’t trying to do anything revolutionary. There are no AI summaries, and no complicated split views like in Superhuman. It’s just your email, sorted in a way that you like.

What does it mean, though, to apply the Notion philosophy to email, and is it good enough for you to make the switch? That is, if you even can. Currently, Notion Mail only works on the Web and on Mac, and it only supports Gmail accounts (leaving out Outlook and enterprise emails). Notion Mail’s iOS app is on the way, and the Android app will launch in 2025 as well. But there’s no app for Windows on the roadmap.

What is Notion?

Notion Mail is the latest product from Notion Labs, which is known for its extremely customizable note taking app. Every note in Notion starts with a blank page, but can be customized with blocks, tables, images and more. Some people even turn it into a database, as Notion makes it easy to link one page to another.

Notion is free to use for individual users, but charges $10 per month per user for businesses. Plus there’s the $10 per month cost for Notion AI, which I’ll come back to below. Essentially, Notion Mail aims to take the same minimalist approach of the note-taking app, and apply it to email.

Notion users will feel at home

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

Let’s start with how Notion Mail looks and works. It has the same unassuming black and white design that Notion is known for. The buttons are gray, and there are none of the pastel colors or rainbow gradients usually found in AI apps these days. In other words, it feels like Gmail did 15 years ago, but modernized.

There’s a sidebar that shows all your views, and then a list of email. And that’s that, as far as design goes. But because this is Notion, there is also a highly useful command palette (Command+K), so you can compose emails or take actions without leaving your keyboard.

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

There’s support for keyboard shortcuts, too, and native Markdown support, which makes formatting long emails a breeze (and is something that’s missing from Gmail and every other major email app).

Notion AI is also integrated into the compose box, so you can highlight text and improve your writing, or write an email with a prompt.

For integrations, you can set up reminders to remind you to reply to an email, in case you miss it. You can also integrate Notion Calendar to easily display your availability.

It’s all about AI Auto Labels

Notion isn’t rocking the boat with its mail app, but its selling point is the Auto Label feature, which is coupled with the sidebar’s Views feature. Let’s talk about the Views first.

When you first click on Views, you’ll be prompted to create feeds for email categories like Promotions, Calendar invites, Updates, and more. You might even be prompted to create custom Views based on your inbox. For instance, the app suggested that I make a view for all my GitHub emails, which is slightly confusing because I’m nowhere near a developer.

But you can go in and create a new View at any time. Notion has some templates ready to go from the start, but the easiest way to go about it is to use a prompt and the AI Auto Label feature.