What is it? A new email app from Notion
Who is it for? Gmail users looking for a cleaner inbox
How much does it cost? Free, subscription required for some features
What makes it special? Common sense minimalism with AI smarts
Notion – one of the most popular productivity tools in the world – released its own take on email earlier this year, but now a dedicated iOS app has launched we thought it was worth investigating. Like many modern mail apps, its big idea is automated sorting, with Notion Mail leans heavily on AI to keep your inbox under control. The result is a clean inbox that’s customizable and laser focused – but it does come with some pretty big caveats.
Notion Mail comes with standard filters to organize common categories of email, but its real strength is how you can define your own. You can type in natural language instructions like “spammy messages from unknown senders” and Notion will attempt to categorize accordingly, splitting the results out into a separate folder.
This isn’t just useful for filtering spam – it also means you can build entirely custom inboxes for whatever matters most to you – whether that’s recruiting emails, customer feedback, or travel plans. These views are distraction-free spaces that help you focus on the right things at the right time. The AI’s accuracy isn’t perfect, but you can easily label emails with a long press to train the system. Much like curating your Spotify recommendations, the more effort you put in, the better the results become.
Beyond filtering, Notion Mail also tackles some of email’s most tedious chores. You can save snippets to reuse common replies, share availability with a built-in scheduling tool that ties into Notion Calendar, set emails to send at a later time/date, format your emails with the familiar Notion editor, and even draft responses with the help of Notion AI.
There are caveats – big ones. Almost all of the features we mentioned above are missing from the iPhone/iPad app at this point – the experience at the time of writing is extremely barebones. You’ll need to set up the custom AI filters from the web interface on a computer before they’ll show up in the app, which is annoying but at least it’s a one-time thing. A bigger deal is the fact that most of the features that might set this apart from other email apps – snippets, scheduling, formatting, AI – are completely missing from the iOS release. There’s also the fact that the AI-powered parts are for paid subscribers only, and Notion Mail only supports Gmail accounts, which makes it a non-starter for anyone on a different provider.
Notion Mail is a promising take on inbox management, but unless you’re a Gmail user who wants to get on board early, we can’t recommend the app just yet. When version 2.0 drops, it might well be a different story – watch this space.