Notion Mail is out

I would not use this without a SOC 2 Type 2 compliance at the very least. Especially when email is involved and Notion-mail reads your from, to, body and saves it in its data centers. The compliance information is also contradictory. The webpage says mail is SOC 2 Type 1 compliant, while the FAQ says<p>&quot;Is Notion Mail SOC 2 compliant?&quot;<p>&quot;While Notion Mail is not currently SOC 2 compliant, we expect Notion Mail to be SOC 2 Type I compliant by GA launch.&quot;<p>Either the FAQ or the landing page needs an update.

I tried out an early version when I did some work at notion last year, just tried it again and it&#x27;s honestly a lot better than I expected. The design is good as expected from a notion product, but it&#x27;s actually lot snappier than I thought. Faster than the notion app lol. It&#x27;s probably a consequence of not having too much legacy code, but still impressive nevertheless! Esp in a world of slow nextjs apps lol. Vibe wise, it kinda feels kinda like superhuman but 0 instead of $30&#x2F;mo lol.<p>Tbh, I can also kinda see the vision that notion is pitching to investors now - the entire productivity suite, but redesigned and enhanced with AI. I&#x27;m not a power user of email&#x2F;calendar by any means, but find myself using their calendar and mail client. I have no doubt the next generation of Tiktok girlies will eat this up like crazy. I don&#x27;t use much of their AI stuff, but can also see how business can really find it useful.<p>GJ Notion team!

I really hate when someone screams AI to promote a product. The word is like a catch-all to mean “does cool things”. And that never helps me trust the product or infomercial.<p>Now AI is hard to describe… BUT DESCRIBE WE MUST. maybe “summarize emails with AI” or “fetch relevant emails to this one with AI” or “get possible responses with AI”. At some point, do you think we can remove *with-AI™?

Am I just too paranoid about email?<p>Since Google has all my email, I am not willing to give any other company access to it. It&#x27;s bad enough that I already rely on Google, mostly for historical reasons, but they at least take security as one of their top priorities. Sure, the three letter agencies might have a copy, even if I&#x27;m a &quot;good guy&quot;, but I assume that at least they won&#x27;t sell the data?

I hoped to get my @notion mailbox, but turns out it&#x27;s just a Gmail client.

Interesting to see that its tied to gmail, which already has pieces of this and is likely working towards the same things.<p>Notion is vastly superior to Sharepoint, OneNote and Docs, it&#x27;s a shame MS and Google abuse their position to push inferior products for the same price.

If it works, great! But their AI assistant is much to be desired. It is really pretty useless most of the time and in terms of text generation I find that I can get better results if I go straight to GPT-4. I know that this is purely down to cost but honestly I feel that bringing better, more powerful models, that can do well consistently would be a killer feature - not an email client.

Please fix how slow notion is before expanding your brand. It’s becoming unusable as it eats up all resources of my M2 mac

I&#x27;ve just learned that the main innovative thing about Notion it&#x27;s their idea of block [1],[2],[3].<p>Notion&#x27;s block can be of any content type and the block is the fundamental building units for all content within platform. This approach allows users to easily customize and rearrange their content by adding, moving, or transforming blocks to suit their needs.<p>I&#x27;m wondering if this powerful and flexible block concept can be enabled and facilitated by the new open table format (OTF) for examples Apache Iceberg and others [4]?<p>But for going gung-ho on flexibility perhaps Jeremy Kepner&#x27;s D4M proposal can enable CMS with even better capability than Notion block based paradigm or Notion++ [5],[6]?<p>[1] What is a block?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.notion.com&#x2F;help&#x2F;what-is-a-block" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.notion.com&#x2F;help&#x2F;what-is-a-block</a><p>[2] The data model behind Notion&#x27;s flexibility (120 comments):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27200177">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27200177</a><p>[3] Notion (productivity software):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Notion_(productivity_software)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Notion_(productivity_software)</a><p>[4] Why Open Table Format Architecture is Essential for Modern Data Systems:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.phdata.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;why-open-table-format-architecture-is-essential-for-modern-data-systems&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.phdata.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;why-open-table-format-architectur...</a><p>[5] D4M: Dynamic Distributed Dimensional Data Model:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mit.edu&#x2F;~kepner&#x2F;D4M&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mit.edu&#x2F;~kepner&#x2F;D4M&#x2F;</a><p>[6] Mathematics of Big Data Spreadsheets, Databases, Matrices, and Graphs:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mitpress.mit.edu&#x2F;9780262038393&#x2F;mathematics-of-big-data&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mitpress.mit.edu&#x2F;9780262038393&#x2F;mathematics-of-big-da...</a>

So they bought and shut down Skiff to make this piece of garbage that only works with gmail?

Is this tied to Gmail because Notion is hoping to be acquired by Google (Workspace)?<p>(Notion + Workspace would be an incredibly strong offering for startups ... if it was all integrated&#x2F;owned by the same company)

Longer-term I think Notion would benefit from going straight for the Google Workspace&#x2F;O365 market and start offering email&#x2F;calendar&#x2F;etc end-to-end, rather than their current strategy of integration. The current strategy makes sense to start building up the suite, but: Google is feeling increasingly vulnerable, Notion itself is one of those rare products that has maintained general positive vibes among its customers for many years, and I think a lot of especially smaller companies would opt for just the notion suite if it checked the major boxes.<p>I&#x27;ve also always felt that Dropbox should have went down this road, after they released Paper in 2015, but I think their time has passed. Google also wasn&#x27;t nearly as vulnerable back then; they still aren&#x27;t super vulnerable now, but I think they&#x27;re trending that way, and if Notion times it right they could be in a great position.

I feel like all SaaS are eventually building a variant of the same things, whether it&#x27;s email client, CRM, analytics, or AI interface builder now. We end up working with dozens of SaaS with overlapping features that are ever so slightly different and solving just one use case.

Notion hiked their pricing recently (not great, but oh well) but someone there had the bright idea to slap a giant yellow banner at the top of every page reminding us that said price change will happen - in 2+ months. No way to remove the banner either, after contacting support it was gone and yesterday it came back.<p>Great when you share notion pages with clients during a video call and that pricing banner hangs around. We are looking to move off Notion now, not because of the banner, but it definitely contributed.

Can&#x27;t believe they shut down <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;skiff.com&#x2F;mail" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;skiff.com&#x2F;mail</a> for a Gmail client :( I was a happy user of Skiff before Notion bought them.

It feels like they&#x27;re making the same mistakes Evernote did. Both had an awesome product with a rabid fanbase. Then they alienated those fans by adding a bunch of collaboration bloat and features that nobody really wanted.

Tried it out and has promise but for now it&#x27;s not as polished. My fave email client right now is Mimestream: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mimestream.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mimestream.com&#x2F;</a>

More like &quot;Notion Mail (for Gmail only). Notion Calendar is Google only. Notion Mail is Google only. I guess I shouldn&#x27;t have expected them to do anything based on standards like IMAP.

Is the interface in the screenshot how it actually looks? IMHO, really needs some more visual structure to the messages table.

I really do not want to see what a mail client with the UX of notion looks like.<p>If anyone uses Notion and really cannot stand their UX, I&#x27;d strongly recommend Whimsical: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;whimsical.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;whimsical.com&#x2F;</a> -- it can do a bit of Trello too.

Remember when people thought Superhuman was the next thing?

Seems mad to build this ahead of just adding usable task lists with assignments.

I quite like this. The &#x27;auto label&#x27; implementation seems to work well (better than others I&#x27;ve tried). The UI is dense too, fitting lots of emails on screen at once.<p>Email is a funny thing. The UI (a list of subjects, senders, and dates) has barely changed in decades. And even now when AI is being added, the inbox UI remains the same. I&#x27;m not sure what I&#x27;d change but I find it surprising how little innovation there has been in that area.<p>As nice as this product is, I still wish Google would bring back Inbox. They created something really great and scrapped it for no good reason.

Surprised they launched this before the mobile app is ready. It doesn&#x27;t make sense to have a bunch of organisational features available to me, but only when I&#x27;m at my laptop. I&#x27;d guess people are hardly at least 50% of their email from their phone.

Very disappointed that this is not an email client. It&#x27;s just an alternative interface for Gmail.<p>This is very surprising, actually because many people in the B2B sphere don&#x27;t use Gmail for their work email.

Only for Gmail? no thank you.

I didn&#x27;t see pricing on the page. How does this compare to superhuman?

Is this integrating with Notion-Workspaces and their abilities? Because this could be really useful, but except the editor, I don&#x27;t see any mention of regular notion-features.

For anyone who used both, how does this compare to superhuman?

I&#x27;ll be keeping Superhuman thanks. But good for Notion.

I&#x27;m really disappointed that Notion acquired and killed a far better product (Skiff) just to release what is essentially an overdressed Gmail client.<p>There&#x27;s no decent selling point over other competitors in the industry and Notion just missed the chance to tie customers into a alternative workspace suite.

Notion search doesn’t work consistently or effectively in their flagship product.

fyi ``` Access blocked: Notion Mail is not approved by Advanced Protection ```

Right now they have a weird limitation that the Gmail address has to match the Notion account, otherwise you would get an error saying “the selected Gmail does not match your Notion address”.

Notion has been great for me since I started using it back in 2021. Hope they get all the success they deserve.<p>That being said, I&#x27;m honestly disappointed with their overall direction. The main product has not improved much since 2021, except for features I assume are catering to their big enterprise customers.<p>It&#x27;s slow, the mobile app has bad UX, the Windows app is a memory hog and I run into issues whenever I build something more complex with it. It&#x27;s still a great product, but as time passes I look more into alternatives...

And what does my exported data look like?<p>A PDF?

Is the company profitable?

Like many AI-driven products, the marquee use case they show is useless. &quot;Job offers that require my signature&quot;?? I am going to have one of these in the air at one time and will not be too busy to keep track the relevant emails! Indicates to me that product is a solution in search of a problem.<p>Similarly, the first Humane AI Pin hype video showed a guy on a train asking his pin to tell him about prices of vintage photos of a solar eclipse.

Another day, another email OOPS, I mean GMAIL client.<p>It&#x27;s quite sad when a testimonial mentions, &quot;making the switch from Gmail,&quot; as if you&#x27;re not still using Gmail?<p>Kudos to Notion though, it looks sleek.

When E2EE?

Time to update Zawinski’s law: any productivity SaaS grows until they release their own branded mail client.