Notion, as my colleagues at TechCrunch scooped earlier Thursday, is announcing an email client at its first "Make with Notion" user conference. For now, Notion Mail is in preview, and at least for the time being, it's more of a Gmail client than a traditional email service. The concept here, Notion says, is to create an email experience that "lets you ditch the old ways of a rigid inbox and embrace a new way: where email works for you and your workflows."

When, though, Notion Mail will actually launch is a question mark. The company's commitment at this point is only to "soon," but there is a waitlist for getting early access.

With Mail, Notion, which claims it now has more than 100 million users, continues its march toward offering a more fully featured suite of productivity options. After all, Notion Mail makes an appearance just a few months after the company launched its Calendar product. Notion Calendar, worth noting, was the fruit of an acquisition, the company buying calendar app Cron in 2022.

Similarly, Notion recently acquired Skiff, a security-centric platform that included an end-to-end encrypted email service. So, it does not really surprise me that Notion Mail takes some design cues from Skiff, though the company's focus here isn't really on security-tightness, though I am pretty sure that is top of mind for Notion as well but rather an integration with Notion AI.

There are two apparently distinct pieces to the AI integration here: automatically organizing your emails by using an AI prompt as a kind of smart filtering mechanism, plus the capacity to allow "Notion AI handle the tedious back-and-forth such as scheduling and follow-ups," according to the company. How well that works in practice remains to be seen.

One nice feature Notion Mail will offer that I often wish Gmail would is that it doesn't just allow for using different filters, but also allows you to prioritize emails inside of those filtered views. Gmail, on the other hand, only offers the "priority inbox" view in the main inbox, but when you drill down to any of its default categories like forums, updates, or social, your only option is a reverse timeline view.

Another great integration is with Notion Calendar. Users will be able to add a scheduling button to their emails, which would link them right to their calendars and availability.

Notion also promised a slate of other new features, on top of Mail. These include Notion Forms: It's essentially an ability to design forms to collect information, with Notion being the database that backs it up, and customization options in terms of how the layout of pages and sections appears within Notion, making things look better according to a given user's taste as to how to display tasks, notes, docs, and more.

Additionally, Notion is introducing a number of advanced automation features that include integration with, for instance, connecting Notion and Gmail to send notices via Gmail. And, rounding everything off, Notion refreshed its Marketplace and also updated the web experience.