Notion Mail lets you build the inbox you actually want

Most email apps have strong opinions about what your inbox should look like. Notion Mail is the opposite.

The new offshoot from productivity app Notion is all about flexibility. It lets you slice and dice your emails however you want: group them by date, create dedicated sections for specific contacts, add notes, or even turn your inbox into a list of action items. There’s also an AI labeling feature that can automatically sort things like package updates or health-related messages.

It can feel overwhelming at first—but so can Notion itself. That hasn’t stopped the productivity platform from amassing 100 million users, with use cases ranging from simple note-taking to complex database management. Notion Mail is trying to bring that same level of adaptability to your inbox—and the more effort you put in, the more useful it gets.

Notion Mail is available now for Gmail and Google Workspace users on the web and as a Mac app. An iOS app is coming soon, and support for more email providers is on the way.

Roll your own inbox

Notion Mail’s most interesting feature is the ability to customize what your default inbox view looks like, both in terms of how it’s organized and which emails you’ll see.

For instance, I like having some visual separation between recent and older emails. By clicking the “Edit View” button and selecting “Groups,” you can choose a “Date” view that sorts emails into clusters for today, yesterday, last week, last month, and earlier.

Notion Mail’s “Groups” feature has some other neat ways to partition your inbox, as well. You can have emails from specific people or domains appear at the top, separate read emails from unread ones, or group by label.

Within the same “Edit View” menu, you can also set up filters to hide or show certain types of messages. This lets you filter out things like Gmail’s Promotions and Updates categories, certain keywords, or specific addresses.

Where things get really interesting, though, is the “Properties” you can apply to each email. Some of these are standard things like the sender’s name or labels, but Notion also lets you append types of data, such as notes and status indicators. You can then use these properties to sort your inbox. By adding statuses like “in progress” or “pending” to your emails and then grouping them by status, for instance, you can turn your inbox into a kind of project management system.

These views aren’t limited to your main inbox. Notion Mail’s left sidebar lets you create additional views, each with their own custom properties and groupings. That means you can keep a traditional inbox as your default, while also setting up a project management–style view for messages from colleagues. Like the main Notion app, Notion Mail includes several templates to help you get started, and it’ll eventually let users create and share their own.

Occasionally iffy AI filtering

Notion Mail’s other big feature involves using AI to organize your emails. With the “Auto Label” feature, you can enter the type of emails you’re looking for, and Notion will try to fetch messages that match.

While Gmail’s own filtering rules can already label incoming messages automatically, Notion’s AI can make inferences that a normal keyword search wouldn’t pick up. An Auto Label rule for “medical/doctor,” for instance, might capture health-related emails even if those words didn’t appear in the message.

This opens up some potentially clever use cases. I set up a rule for anything related to package arrivals, for instance, giving me a quick way to see the status of all my deliveries. I also made a “Suggest emails to delete” rule, then used Notion’s Unsubscribe button to remove myself from a bunch of mailing lists.

The downside to this approach is that it can miss things. When I set up a “Florida 2025 trip” Auto Label, it tagged a bunch of unrelated emails and excluded a few relevant ones. You can help the labeling by tagging or untagging specific messages, but in some cases you’re just better off labeling emails manually.

AI labeling is also how Notion plans to make money from its mail product. While Notion Mail is free, a $10 per month AI add-on is required to label more than a few hundred emails or so. That upgrade also adds AI composition features, and provides access to AI features in Notion proper.

Tying it all together

After a few days of using Notion Mail, I can see how it might dig its hooks in.

It’s been a while since I’ve used Notion for everyday notetaking—I switched to Obsidian, an offline-first alternative, a couple years back—but I still remember how it won me over. I started off using it for simple note-taking, but before long had developed a branching system of subpages for different projects, and was using templates to organize some of my product reviews. The more time I spent tweaking my notetaking setup, the more personally invested in it I felt.

Notion Mail has a pretty similar learning curve. My first step was to set up a basic inbox view with just a few personalized tweaks, but I’ve started to experiment with alternative views and can see how they might be better at organizing all the info that’s trapped inside Gmail. And I know that if I keep sinking more time into it, the harder it’ll get to use anything else.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91316354/notion-mail-lets-you-build-the-inbox-you-actually-want?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss