Notion Mail Takes You Back to the Days When Gmail Was Good
Notion Mail is finally available to everyone with a Gmail account. And this is the quintessence of the concept. If you’ve used the stock Notion app, you really won’t be able to mistake it for anything else.
Notion Mail is a minimalist, text-based take on the Mail app that doesn’t try to do anything revolutionary. There are no AI summaries and complex split views like in Superhuman . It’s just your email, sorted the way you like it.
However, what does it mean to apply the Notion philosophy to email and is it good enough for you to make the switch? That is, if you can at all. Currently, Notion Mail only works on the web and Mac, and only supports Gmail accounts (excluding Outlook and business email). A Notion Mail app for iOS is already in development, and an Android app will also launch in 2025. But there are no plans for a Windows app.
What is a concept?
Notion Mail is the latest product from Notion Labs, known for its highly 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, since Notion makes it easy to link one page to another.
Notion is free to use for individual users, but businesses charge $10 per month per user. There’s also a $10/month fee for Notion AI, which I’ll come back to below. Essentially, Notion Mail aims to take the same minimalist approach as a note-taking app and apply it to email.
Notion users will feel right at home
Let’s start with how Notion Mail looks and works. It has the same understated black and white design that Notion is known for. The buttons are gray, and there are no pastel colors or rainbow gradients that are commonly found in AI apps these days. In other words, it’s like Gmail 15 years ago, but modernized.
There’s a sidebar that shows all your views and then a list of email addresses. And that’s all about design. But because it’s Notion, there’s also a very useful command palette (Command+K) that lets you compose emails or perform actions without leaving your keyboard.
There’s also support for keyboard shortcuts and built-in Markdown support, which makes formatting long emails easier (and something Gmail and every other major email app doesn’t have).
Notion AI is also integrated into the input field, so you can highlight text and improve your text or write an email with a hint.
For integration, you can set reminders to remind you to reply to an email if you miss it. You can also integrate Notion Calendar to easily display your availability.
It’s all about artificial intelligence car labels
Notion doesn’t rock the boat with its email app, but its advantage is the Auto Label feature, which combines with the Views feature in the sidebar. Let’s talk about views first.
When you first click Views, you’ll be prompted to create feeds for email categories like Promotions, Calendar Invitations, Updates, etc. You may even be prompted to create custom views based on your inbox. For example, the app prompted me to view all my emails on GitHub, which is a bit confusing since I’m not a developer.
But you can log in and create a new view at any time. Notion has several templates ready to use right out of the box, but the easiest way to do this is to use the AI tooltip and auto-tagging feature.
Click the Auto Label button on the top toolbar at any time to create a new label. Here you will see a simple text field. Enter any prompt here to create an automatic tag. For example, you can type “Emails from Reddit” or “Emails from Grace” to get started. It can help to get some granularity: the more detailed or specific you can make it, the better for you.
After entering the prompt, you will see a toggle switch asking whether you want to separate these emails from your inbox or not. Notion will also prompt you to “automatically tag similar” emails as you go about your business.
Don’t worry: Notion will ask you to approve any labels before you apply them. If something is wrong, you can delete this letter or add a letter that the system missed.
After a couple of days of using AI Auto Labels, my impressions were mixed. The first thing to note is that automatic tagging doesn’t go as far as we’d like. So you can’t use it to sort all your Amazon bills from the last year in one view. To do this, you’ll still have to use Gmail search or other AI like Shortwave. However, you can create a view for all incoming emails and Amazon invoices so that your future emails are at least fully customized.
Although Notion Mail is free, with the free plan you only get limited access to Notion AI features, including the automatic labeling feature. Notion doesn’t specify what the specific limitations are for individuals, but I ran into them fairly quickly after a routine test in which I created 5-6 automatic tags and tested Notion AI’s recording capabilities. The business limits are a little clearer: Notion states that free AI tokens are limited to 500 responses per workspace . And the more people you add to your workspace, the more Notion increases your free replies limit.
As for me, my Notion AI trial ended after only 10 or so responses. And once that happens, you’ll either have to wait until next month to get more free AI credits, or pay $10 a month for unlimited use. When you run out of free Notion AI credits, the auto-tag feature will stop working and the red icon button will stop working as well. The same goes for AI writing functions.
Notion wrapper for Gmail
Notion Mail can serve as a good alternative for Gmail users who are frustrated by increasing bloat or having to avoid Gemini sidebars . For these users, Gmail’s minimalist, testing-intensive option with keyboard support and Markdown should serve as a faster, simpler alternative.
But when it comes to AI, it’s still a developing story. AI writing tools are now pretty standard in almost every email app, so whether you’ll like Notion depends on how much you like tagging your email and how interested you are in AI helping you do it. If you want something more sophisticated, try Shortwave , which offers free and paid plans, as well as more robust AI inbox integration. It’s less minimal, but also much more powerful.