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
"Is Notion Mail SOC 2 compliant?"
"While Notion Mail is not currently SOC 2 compliant, we expect Notion Mail to be SOC 2 Type I compliant by GA launch."
Either the FAQ or the landing page needs an update.
And for anyone who hasn't gone through the certification process before, SOC 2 Type I means that they were able to demonstrate a set of controls and evidence that their implementation passes those controls — just once. Type 2 is continuously evaluated. Notion being SOC 2 Type 2 and Notion Email only being Type 1 is a red flag that they're doing something weird or not re-using policies and infrastructure.
> Notion being SOC 2 Type 2 and Notion Email only being Type 1 is a red flag that they're doing something weird or not re-using policies and infrastructure.
No it's not. It's a new product. As you aptly pointed out, Type 2 is "over time". It's a fixed time period (at a minimum three months) that you have to be observed. That means you can't get a type 2 until you've been live for 3 months, and that's assuming you've already engaged the auditor on day one.
Given that this is a new space for them, they probably had to add new infra or policies that weren't under consideration before.
Not necessarily. A SOC2 audit also often has a "Scope" – that can mean that some apps are in-scope for the audit, and some aren't.
It might be that this particular app was not ready to be in scope for their audit or observation period, so was left out, even if it's in the same infrastructure.
It still means the app is less mature, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it's a red flag.
Either way, I'd wait for something this critical (like giving it access to my email) for a few months to have any low hanging fruit bugs worked out before jumping in.
It's because they acquired Skiff. They would have to fully integrate it into their compliant infrastructure and then qualify it. I don't think that's a red flag although they could've waited to launch. I'm not a Notion user.
Ah, I didn't realize this was because of an acquisition. Separate infra and policies makes some sense then. Still weird but at least there's a good explanation.
I tried out an early version when I did some work at notion last year, just tried it again and it's honestly a lot better than I expected. The design is good as expected from a notion product, but it's actually lot snappier than I thought. Faster than the notion app lol. It'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/mo lol.
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'm not a power user of email/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't use much of their AI stuff, but can also see how business can really find it useful.
I was more talking about the optimistic updates n caching as opposed the actual rendering. From my experience, the reason why most apps are slow is more so cuz of the former than the latter(like the spinner in ur notion)
When it comes to the actual rendering performance, it’s an electron app, so … whatever you make of that
Personally, I feel like often times electron apps are actually smoother than swift apps nowadays due to the way swift renders text(ie. the ChatGPT app was so laggy when it was released, unclear if they fixed it). Start up time is probably slightly slower than native too but not a hugeee issue for me.
Probably not as fast as superhuman. But I don’t want to pay $30 for a 10ms diff(might be more idk)
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.
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™?
Since Google has all my email, I am not willing to give any other company access to it. It'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'm a "good guy", but I assume that at least they won't sell the data?
You are not. I always say your email account is the most valuable thing you own. You need to keep it more secure than even your bank account (because that is easy to recover and rollback if stolen)
My password manager and email are the two things I own that require three factors to access - username, password, and hardware authenticator.
No way in hell I’m going to even consider using a new webmail product from a small startup.
I agree that it's very important not to lose control of your email account. Someone taking it over would be very bad indeed.
On the other hand, I don't have very high expectations when it comes to the security of the actual email messages. I don't control the other end at all. Email infrastructure, software and protocols are old and varied. Keeping those messages secure seems a bit hopeless.
Username and passwords should be considered a single factor, even moreso for email since your username is often your email address and could be considered public information.
The four types of factors are: something you know, something you have, something you are, somewhere you are.
I know my employer wouldn’t be happy about me redirecting my $WORK email to a third party for the purposes of AI mining my email.
It isn’t just paranoia, but also security, compliance, etc… all of which is very high on my employer’s checklist.
So realistically this means that the main use case is probably going to be personal email accounts. So IMO, Notion’s goal should be trying to get people to move their personal accounts first. Then once people get used to the features, they can try to move companies over. Advertising corporate use cases (job offers, expense reports) just doesn’t make much sense to me.
This was also the Gmail playbook when they started too. In addition to dogfooding their own corporate email, Gmail at first was a replacement for personal Yahoo and Hotmail accounts. Then it became useful for companies after people got used to using Gmail for their personal accounts.
This is not true. In some organizations I work with they only allow Security Keys on Google Workspace, you can't even use TOTP.
It's possible to disable SMS and Phone verification, but if you allow TOTP then Google Prompt is also automatically allowed.
yes I don't like security decisions forced upon me, that's reasonable. if I want a throwaway email, I don't need MFA because I don't care if the account is compromised. but I don't get to make that decision because Google decided for me that my account will have forced MFA
>if I want a throwaway email, I don't need MFA because I don't care if the account is compromised.
But Google cares if their servers are used to send spam or worse, because it makes their email service less useful for other users who may not use it as a throwaway account.
Interesting to see that its tied to gmail, which already has pieces of this and is likely working towards the same things.
Notion is vastly superior to Sharepoint, OneNote and Docs, it's a shame MS and Google abuse their position to push inferior products for the same price.
I could do search and replace for years. Notion only added that recently.
Imo notion is a fun tool. But it’s a toy.
It is slow and worse, not accurate at all, when you have any actual data (100+ items you’re actively working with), clunky interface, and is good if you’re a student taking notes and making forms, or doing something casual before you need something robust.
For anything else, Docs and Sheets are far superior and better products.
Google Docs is the clunky mess here and gets away with it because they nailed collaboration early and competed with an even bigger clunkier mess in Microsoft Word. Word at least is a full featured word processor, whereas Google Docs is a struggles with anything more than basic layout or formatting needs.
Notion isn’t a word processor, but unless you’re specifically trying to craft documents it doesn’t need to be. It also isn’t a spreadsheet, and you’re going to have a bad time if you try to make it act as such.
If we’re being dismissive, Google Sheets is also a poor tool for “actual data.” Modern spreadsheet usage is just a pile of inefficient hacks to operate them as pseduo-DBs. Unless you’re in the finance or accounting world, in which case you’re probably using Excel, anything else would be better served by using more powerful open-source data analysis formats and tools.
I have a million complaints about Notion, but holding up Google Workspace as the paradigm of elite enterprise product design is a joke. Get back to me when I can take the markdown produced by Gemini Canvas and paste it into Docs without issues.
For starters, Google suite offers substantial storage so you can actually use it for doing those things, even if they're not as good as you want, for far longer.
And if you do want actual enterprise tier, lots of startups and even public companies use Google suite for all their teams.
Even worse, it's a toy that people build elaborate things out of and then use them for business-critical functions. It's incredibly irritating to work with a Notion power user.
It must be great if you're a control freak, though. Get leadership to recognize your Notion doc as the source of truth, and then you get absolute control because nobody else wants to touch it.
> It is slow and worse, not accurate at all, when you have any actual data (100+ items you’re actively working with), clunky interface, and is good if you’re a student taking notes and making forms, or doing something casual before you need something robust.
I wish I could convince the people I work with of the same thing. Though I don't really have a better alternative either.
I wonder how much of that is simply due to the ability to use the Gmail API vs IMAP.
I’ve been knocking around the idea of building an email client, but IMAP looks like nightmare fuel. JMAP would be perfect but adoption looks like it’s going nowhere.
[edit] Seeing a lot of people here diss on Gmail. I don’t blame you, I want out too. If you want more options, lean on your email provider to start supporting JMAP. https://jmap.io
Eh, Notion is fine. I quickly ran into scaling problems with it and the block-style editing is only really nice/useful if you're doing a lot of live collaboration.
That being said, I do like opinionated tools better than unopinionated ones (Google Doc) because it's less mental overhead to just make something. But I reach for plain markdown instead.
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.
I've just learned that the main innovative thing about Notion it's their idea of block [1],[2],[3].
Notion'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.
I'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]?
But for going gung-ho on flexibility perhaps Jeremy Kepner's D4M proposal can enable CMS with even better capability than Notion block based paradigm or Notion++ [5],[6]?
Yes, I just tried using Notion again the other day after being annoyed with Obsidian Projects and even with only a couple entries on a notion database page, it took MINUTES to load, on web and on the desktop version. Uninstalled it immediately and went back to Obsidian.
I’m completely done with Notion now. It was great when it was new, worked well and did what it advertised. But now it has too many features and I feel its core functionality has really suffered.
Yeah, I totally abandoned Notion last year because it got too slow. The whole thing is pointless if it takes a minute or two just to navigate to the page I want. It takes a few seconds to do that on an archaic corporate SMB share.
Surely this could be addressed by putting more AI on top.
On a serious note, my team is very happy we migrated from Notion to Linear for task tracking last year, but we're still looking how to cover the wiki part.
I use Mail.app all the time because I like a unified inbox. But is this one of those "let's build everything in rust since it's super-fast"? (I HOPE so actually).
Or is it just another electron app? For sure there are nice examples of snappy electron apps (like Linear) but which one is it?
I feel there might be a market for a fully native MODERN and OS-native looking mail client (alternative to at least Mac Mail, but actually fast with search that is actually useful).
> But is this one of those "let's build everything in rust since it's super-fast"? (I HOPE so actually).
No. It's not written in Rust. Language choice would have literally nothing to do with making IMAP/the email experience any faster. I don't want to make any firm claims as we've yet to do serious benchmarking, but what we've built is _much_ faster than Mail.app, let alone Gmail.
The tech we've chosen, and the actual app itself, essentially _feels_ like Linear for email.
> I feel there might be a market for a fully native MODERN and OS-native looking mail client (alternative to at least Mac Mail, but actually fast with search that is actually useful).
Yes, this is what we're building, but a bit beyond that. It's completely cross-platform: web, Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, Linux. Any N number of clients a user might have running will seamlessly and instantly sync, given network availability. That said, each client is also fully offline-first.
There _is_ a market for this. It's been a nasty problem to solve, but we have a massive waitlist.
Superhuman has achieved great success (although being an over-valued VC org) but only support Google + Microsoft _via_ API access.
Notion launching their product is further validation that there's a lot of space in this market.
But Marco is quite different. We're building a cross-platform IMAP-primitive email client that gets the basics right. It'll work with any email provider that supports IMAP (basically all). We're not pushing or even _building_ any "AI" stuff yet.
I wrote a blog post detailed our motivations here:
It would be better if Notion became a full competitor to Google Workspace. If they start their own email hosting and calendar backend for Notion Calendar, it would be getting closer.
Longer-term I think Notion would benefit from going straight for the Google Workspace/O365 market and start offering email/calendar/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.
I'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't nearly as vulnerable back then; they still aren't super vulnerable now, but I think they're trending that way, and if Notion times it right they could be in a great position.
Competing against that market would be extremely difficult. These are two well entrenched companies that their lock in makes switching from extremely difficult so you would be forced sell to new companies which means revenue early on would be very low. Also, if you don't have 100% compatibility, they will throw their hands up and switch to one of established vendors.
Yeah the Google/MS tier of integration is not the level Notion can play in. But being good friends to those integrations means they'll win against all the other productivity SAASs that get thrown around at any given company.
I feel like all SaaS are eventually building a variant of the same things, whether it'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.
"AI" is just a buzzword most of the time. So many companies have literally just added it to their product name, or in to some description of the product. In all likelihood, nothing has really changed other than maybe a thin OpenAI API wrapper doing something nobody asked for.
Also, "AI" in it's majority current form, has been around for decades it's just cool now to use the word "AI" when branding a product/company.
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.
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.
If you're interested in real-time collaboration within Obsidian, check out Relay [0]. We just released an on-prem hosting of our collaboration server, and we have folder-scoped sharing. We're making Obsidian work for work.
Notion seemed cool until finding out that getting information into/out of it was more of a painful, messy chore than I wanted it to be.
After trying Notion and experiencing the 'lock-in' for myself, I switched to Obsidian years ago - no regrets. Combined with Syncthing, it works surprisingly well - offering graceful/seamless editing of the same Notes across Windows desktop and multiple Macs, updating to the other devices in essentially real-time.
It feels like they'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.
More like "Notion Mail (for Gmail only). Notion Calendar is Google only. Notion Mail is Google only. I guess I shouldn't have expected them to do anything based on standards like IMAP.
The same people who thought that sort of thing, probably over-invested.
Once they (investors) have realized that there is no growth or anything to extract, or a lack of further fundraising, then it is written off and they move on.
I quite like this. The 'auto label' implementation seems to work well (better than others I've tried). The UI is dense too, fitting lots of emails on screen at once.
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'm not sure what I'd change but I find it surprising how little innovation there has been in that area.
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't make sense to have a bunch of organisational features available to me, but only when I'm at my laptop. I'd guess people are hardly at least 50% of their email from their phone.
Right now it seems to be pretty simple. It's free for most usage and has some AI features.
Edit: according to the pricing page, Notion AI can organize your inbox if you have the Notion AI add-on. Not quite sure if you can do this on free to some amount.
Is this integrating with Notion-Workspaces and their abilities? Because this could be really useful, but except the editor, I don't see any mention of regular notion-features.
I'm really disappointed that Notion acquired and killed a far better product (Skiff) just to release what is essentially an overdressed Gmail client.
There'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 has been great for me since I started using it back in 2021. Hope they get all the success they deserve.
That being said, I'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.
It'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's still a great product, but as time passes I look more into alternatives...
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”.
Like many AI-driven products, the marquee use case they show is useless. "Job offers that require my signature"?? 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.
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.
I also like that the first screenshot on the page shows an email from "Finance Dept" with the subject "Expense report status" as a "Cold email". That example almost definitely has some back story to it, thus not making it a cold email.
Wow, that is a bizarre example? So bizarre I feel like I must be misunderstanding it. When does someone have multiple job offers in their inbox awaiting a signature? And it’s something you’re searching for as if you have to go through your weekly slog of signing job offers? Someone tell me what I’m misunderstanding.
That actually makes a lot of sense. What little you see of the emails they look completely different though - if ”I” sent them, you’d think they would be more similar.
Regarding the job offer example. I'll have 1 to sign every 2-5 years, I should be able to manage that myself.
That said, I'd love a better email client that wasn't feeding an advertising company. I'm planning to spend some time with this to see if it fits any of my needs.
Edit: Oh, this is just a gmail wrapper/addon. Nevermind, moving along.
maybe this isn't what you're looking for since it is paid, but I am very happy with fastmail
edit: just realized I skipped a word while reading and you said client. I know some people use it to manage all email (including from gmail accounts) but that's not actually my use case.
It makes sense though -- Gmail has little in common with normal email besides usage of SMTP transport, and has a lot bigger market share than normal email. (Exchange also doesn't count as "normal email" - so that's the reason for my confident assertion.)
I don’t think it makes sense, per se, considering Gmail’s ubiquity comes from Google offering it as a free product, and then all the barriers to creating an email provider being raised in an attempt to combat spam.
There’s barely any point in setting up your own provider now because you have to compete both with free. All the action has been around email clients which have typically been acquired and then crushed.
Google could have stuck with the protocol or presented a spec for it, rather than leaving the competition with IMAP and SMTP.
What makes sense is they dominated the market and helped put up roadblocks afterwards. EEE.
Is there an equivalent law for "every enterprise app eventually adds product management features"? Slack, Google Sheets and Miro are all guilty of this. I just want chat, pivot tables and diagrams but every update is like "we just added a Gantt Chart and Task Workflow templates guys!"
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
"Is Notion Mail SOC 2 compliant?"
"While Notion Mail is not currently SOC 2 compliant, we expect Notion Mail to be SOC 2 Type I compliant by GA launch."
Either the FAQ or the landing page needs an update.
And for anyone who hasn't gone through the certification process before, SOC 2 Type I means that they were able to demonstrate a set of controls and evidence that their implementation passes those controls — just once. Type 2 is continuously evaluated. Notion being SOC 2 Type 2 and Notion Email only being Type 1 is a red flag that they're doing something weird or not re-using policies and infrastructure.
> Notion being SOC 2 Type 2 and Notion Email only being Type 1 is a red flag that they're doing something weird or not re-using policies and infrastructure.
No it's not. It's a new product. As you aptly pointed out, Type 2 is "over time". It's a fixed time period (at a minimum three months) that you have to be observed. That means you can't get a type 2 until you've been live for 3 months, and that's assuming you've already engaged the auditor on day one.
Given that this is a new space for them, they probably had to add new infra or policies that weren't under consideration before.
Not necessarily. A SOC2 audit also often has a "Scope" – that can mean that some apps are in-scope for the audit, and some aren't.
It might be that this particular app was not ready to be in scope for their audit or observation period, so was left out, even if it's in the same infrastructure.
It still means the app is less mature, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it's a red flag.
Either way, I'd wait for something this critical (like giving it access to my email) for a few months to have any low hanging fruit bugs worked out before jumping in.
My guess is that notion mail is on the way to Soc 2 type 2. You start by getting type 1 and then get evaluated for 2 after a period of time.
I was surprised that our auditors wanted to re-do Soc 2 for our second product rather than just apply it to the company.
It's because they acquired Skiff. They would have to fully integrate it into their compliant infrastructure and then qualify it. I don't think that's a red flag although they could've waited to launch. I'm not a Notion user.
Ah, I didn't realize this was because of an acquisition. Separate infra and policies makes some sense then. Still weird but at least there's a good explanation.
FYI they've changed the FAQ and it now claims they're SOC2 compliant
I tried out an early version when I did some work at notion last year, just tried it again and it's honestly a lot better than I expected. The design is good as expected from a notion product, but it's actually lot snappier than I thought. Faster than the notion app lol. It'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/mo lol.
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'm not a power user of email/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't use much of their AI stuff, but can also see how business can really find it useful.
GJ Notion team!
> Faster than the notion app lol
Not exactly a high bar. How fast is it actually? Unless it's native perf (or at least as good as Superhuman) I won't bother.
I was more talking about the optimistic updates n caching as opposed the actual rendering. From my experience, the reason why most apps are slow is more so cuz of the former than the latter(like the spinner in ur notion)
When it comes to the actual rendering performance, it’s an electron app, so … whatever you make of that
Personally, I feel like often times electron apps are actually smoother than swift apps nowadays due to the way swift renders text(ie. the ChatGPT app was so laggy when it was released, unclear if they fixed it). Start up time is probably slightly slower than native too but not a hugeee issue for me.
Probably not as fast as superhuman. But I don’t want to pay $30 for a 10ms diff(might be more idk)
OK ... someone's gotta ask, so I am doing it: How long until e-mails are analyzed and information from e-mail send off to third parties?
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.
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™?
100%, it is just a buzzword right now with so many companies trying to get in on the "action" without actually providing anything useful.
Hacker News will hate this, but if they told me the stack (e.g. Typescript or Rust) it would actually provide more information.
“Does cool things, wrongly” ;)
Do~~n't~~ be ~~evil~~ cool
Am I just too paranoid about email?
Since Google has all my email, I am not willing to give any other company access to it. It'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'm a "good guy", but I assume that at least they won't sell the data?
> Am I just too paranoid about email?
You are not. I always say your email account is the most valuable thing you own. You need to keep it more secure than even your bank account (because that is easy to recover and rollback if stolen)
My password manager and email are the two things I own that require three factors to access - username, password, and hardware authenticator.
No way in hell I’m going to even consider using a new webmail product from a small startup.
I agree that it's very important not to lose control of your email account. Someone taking it over would be very bad indeed.
On the other hand, I don't have very high expectations when it comes to the security of the actual email messages. I don't control the other end at all. Email infrastructure, software and protocols are old and varied. Keeping those messages secure seems a bit hopeless.
Username and passwords should be considered a single factor, even moreso for email since your username is often your email address and could be considered public information.
The four types of factors are: something you know, something you have, something you are, somewhere you are.
username&password is 2FA? :)
I know my employer wouldn’t be happy about me redirecting my $WORK email to a third party for the purposes of AI mining my email.
It isn’t just paranoia, but also security, compliance, etc… all of which is very high on my employer’s checklist.
So realistically this means that the main use case is probably going to be personal email accounts. So IMO, Notion’s goal should be trying to get people to move their personal accounts first. Then once people get used to the features, they can try to move companies over. Advertising corporate use cases (job offers, expense reports) just doesn’t make much sense to me.
This was also the Gmail playbook when they started too. In addition to dogfooding their own corporate email, Gmail at first was a replacement for personal Yahoo and Hotmail accounts. Then it became useful for companies after people got used to using Gmail for their personal accounts.
I hoped to get my @notion mailbox, but turns out it's just a Gmail client.
[dead]
yeah gross. I just finished moving everything off Gmail because they are forcing MFA
you moved off gmail due to forced mfa of all things? interesting...
also, aren't 'app passwords' or whatever they call it still a thing?
They won’t allow you to use regular TOTP alone. You always have to link a phone, even for Google Workspace. It sucks!
This is not true. In some organizations I work with they only allow Security Keys on Google Workspace, you can't even use TOTP. It's possible to disable SMS and Phone verification, but if you allow TOTP then Google Prompt is also automatically allowed.
Neither my Google Workspace account nor my personal Gmail account has a phone number.
yes I don't like security decisions forced upon me, that's reasonable. if I want a throwaway email, I don't need MFA because I don't care if the account is compromised. but I don't get to make that decision because Google decided for me that my account will have forced MFA
>if I want a throwaway email, I don't need MFA because I don't care if the account is compromised.
But Google cares if their servers are used to send spam or worse, because it makes their email service less useful for other users who may not use it as a throwaway account.
I imagine it's because they would be (legally) responsible for any malicious usage of your account.
Based on what? Have the laws changed, or has there been a recent ruling on something related to this?
"I imagine" which means they have no idea what they are talking about
Interesting to see that its tied to gmail, which already has pieces of this and is likely working towards the same things.
Notion is vastly superior to Sharepoint, OneNote and Docs, it's a shame MS and Google abuse their position to push inferior products for the same price.
No way. Google docs is amazing.
I could do search and replace for years. Notion only added that recently.
Imo notion is a fun tool. But it’s a toy.
It is slow and worse, not accurate at all, when you have any actual data (100+ items you’re actively working with), clunky interface, and is good if you’re a student taking notes and making forms, or doing something casual before you need something robust.
For anything else, Docs and Sheets are far superior and better products.
Google Docs is the clunky mess here and gets away with it because they nailed collaboration early and competed with an even bigger clunkier mess in Microsoft Word. Word at least is a full featured word processor, whereas Google Docs is a struggles with anything more than basic layout or formatting needs.
Notion isn’t a word processor, but unless you’re specifically trying to craft documents it doesn’t need to be. It also isn’t a spreadsheet, and you’re going to have a bad time if you try to make it act as such.
If we’re being dismissive, Google Sheets is also a poor tool for “actual data.” Modern spreadsheet usage is just a pile of inefficient hacks to operate them as pseduo-DBs. Unless you’re in the finance or accounting world, in which case you’re probably using Excel, anything else would be better served by using more powerful open-source data analysis formats and tools.
I have a million complaints about Notion, but holding up Google Workspace as the paradigm of elite enterprise product design is a joke. Get back to me when I can take the markdown produced by Gemini Canvas and paste it into Docs without issues.
For starters, Google suite offers substantial storage so you can actually use it for doing those things, even if they're not as good as you want, for far longer.
And if you do want actual enterprise tier, lots of startups and even public companies use Google suite for all their teams.
Even worse, it's a toy that people build elaborate things out of and then use them for business-critical functions. It's incredibly irritating to work with a Notion power user.
It must be great if you're a control freak, though. Get leadership to recognize your Notion doc as the source of truth, and then you get absolute control because nobody else wants to touch it.
> It is slow and worse, not accurate at all, when you have any actual data (100+ items you’re actively working with), clunky interface, and is good if you’re a student taking notes and making forms, or doing something casual before you need something robust.
I wish I could convince the people I work with of the same thing. Though I don't really have a better alternative either.
Yeah. Docs and sheets are downright impressive pieces of web technology
I agree. It's nice and fun for lifestyle use cases like organizing a small trip with a few friends.
I disagree. OneNote is still the best for hierarchy hall Freeform notes.
I wonder how much of that is simply due to the ability to use the Gmail API vs IMAP.
I’ve been knocking around the idea of building an email client, but IMAP looks like nightmare fuel. JMAP would be perfect but adoption looks like it’s going nowhere.
[edit] Seeing a lot of people here diss on Gmail. I don’t blame you, I want out too. If you want more options, lean on your email provider to start supporting JMAP. https://jmap.io
IMAP is indeed nightmare fuel.
We're building https://marcoapp.io
Notion is not in anyway whatsoever in the same category as OneNote. Tell me when it has handwriting support.
They both recently sold AI to every customer by force. (Free ai, increased price)
Not MS yet. I am still paying extra
They are doing it in waves. When your account gets the price increase you can select cancel and will be offered the old price plan.
Oh my friend told me they did it for 360 subscribers too. Maybe the conditions are different.
I keep hearing the same thing.
Eh, Notion is fine. I quickly ran into scaling problems with it and the block-style editing is only really nice/useful if you're doing a lot of live collaboration.
That being said, I do like opinionated tools better than unopinionated ones (Google Doc) because it's less mental overhead to just make something. But I reach for plain markdown instead.
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.
I wonder why don’t Notion let us use our own API keys for OpenAI (and compatible) services?
They're trying to build a moat by leaving out features that rely on other services. I wonder how that will work out for them.
> trying to build a moat by leaving out features that rely on other services
Except for Gmail?
Much easier to get people to use an extension of an existing email account than switch emails.
I've just learned that the main innovative thing about Notion it's their idea of block [1],[2],[3].
Notion'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.
I'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]?
But for going gung-ho on flexibility perhaps Jeremy Kepner's D4M proposal can enable CMS with even better capability than Notion block based paradigm or Notion++ [5],[6]?
[1] What is a block?
https://www.notion.com/help/what-is-a-block
[2] The data model behind Notion's flexibility (120 comments):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27200177
[3] Notion (productivity software):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notion_(productivity_software)
[4] Why Open Table Format Architecture is Essential for Modern Data Systems:
https://www.phdata.io/blog/why-open-table-format-architectur...
[5] D4M: Dynamic Distributed Dimensional Data Model:
https://www.mit.edu/~kepner/D4M/
[6] Mathematics of Big Data Spreadsheets, Databases, Matrices, and Graphs:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262038393/mathematics-of-big-da...
Please fix how slow notion is before expanding your brand. It’s becoming unusable as it eats up all resources of my M2 mac
Yes, I just tried using Notion again the other day after being annoyed with Obsidian Projects and even with only a couple entries on a notion database page, it took MINUTES to load, on web and on the desktop version. Uninstalled it immediately and went back to Obsidian.
I’m completely done with Notion now. It was great when it was new, worked well and did what it advertised. But now it has too many features and I feel its core functionality has really suffered.
Yeah, I totally abandoned Notion last year because it got too slow. The whole thing is pointless if it takes a minute or two just to navigate to the page I want. It takes a few seconds to do that on an archaic corporate SMB share.
Surely this could be addressed by putting more AI on top.
On a serious note, my team is very happy we migrated from Notion to Linear for task tracking last year, but we're still looking how to cover the wiki part.
So they bought and shut down Skiff to make this piece of garbage that only works with gmail?
Have a look at Marco. It's IMAP primitive and will work with any email provider. I'm a co-founder and we're bootstrapped.
https://marcoapp.io
Very interesting...
I use Mail.app all the time because I like a unified inbox. But is this one of those "let's build everything in rust since it's super-fast"? (I HOPE so actually).
Or is it just another electron app? For sure there are nice examples of snappy electron apps (like Linear) but which one is it?
I feel there might be a market for a fully native MODERN and OS-native looking mail client (alternative to at least Mac Mail, but actually fast with search that is actually useful).
Is that what you're building?
Good questions!
> But is this one of those "let's build everything in rust since it's super-fast"? (I HOPE so actually).
No. It's not written in Rust. Language choice would have literally nothing to do with making IMAP/the email experience any faster. I don't want to make any firm claims as we've yet to do serious benchmarking, but what we've built is _much_ faster than Mail.app, let alone Gmail.
The tech we've chosen, and the actual app itself, essentially _feels_ like Linear for email.
> I feel there might be a market for a fully native MODERN and OS-native looking mail client (alternative to at least Mac Mail, but actually fast with search that is actually useful).
Yes, this is what we're building, but a bit beyond that. It's completely cross-platform: web, Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, Linux. Any N number of clients a user might have running will seamlessly and instantly sync, given network availability. That said, each client is also fully offline-first.
There _is_ a market for this. It's been a nasty problem to solve, but we have a massive waitlist.
Superhuman has achieved great success (although being an over-valued VC org) but only support Google + Microsoft _via_ API access.
Notion launching their product is further validation that there's a lot of space in this market.
But Marco is quite different. We're building a cross-platform IMAP-primitive email client that gets the basics right. It'll work with any email provider that supports IMAP (basically all). We're not pushing or even _building_ any "AI" stuff yet.
I wrote a blog post detailed our motivations here:
https://marcoapp.io/blog/marco-an-introduction
Let me know if you have any follow-up questions.
Is this tied to Gmail because Notion is hoping to be acquired by Google (Workspace)?
(Notion + Workspace would be an incredibly strong offering for startups ... if it was all integrated/owned by the same company)
It would be better if Notion became a full competitor to Google Workspace. If they start their own email hosting and calendar backend for Notion Calendar, it would be getting closer.
I strongly suspect that is their goal. They acquired Skiff.
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Longer-term I think Notion would benefit from going straight for the Google Workspace/O365 market and start offering email/calendar/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.
I'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't nearly as vulnerable back then; they still aren't super vulnerable now, but I think they're trending that way, and if Notion times it right they could be in a great position.
Competing against that market would be extremely difficult. These are two well entrenched companies that their lock in makes switching from extremely difficult so you would be forced sell to new companies which means revenue early on would be very low. Also, if you don't have 100% compatibility, they will throw their hands up and switch to one of established vendors.
Yeah the Google/MS tier of integration is not the level Notion can play in. But being good friends to those integrations means they'll win against all the other productivity SAASs that get thrown around at any given company.
I honestly thought Salesforce was leaning this direction with Quip and Slack. Granted, Quip was never a good product. So I guess that fumbled.
I feel like all SaaS are eventually building a variant of the same things, whether it'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.
"AI" is just a buzzword most of the time. So many companies have literally just added it to their product name, or in to some description of the product. In all likelihood, nothing has really changed other than maybe a thin OpenAI API wrapper doing something nobody asked for.
Also, "AI" in it's majority current form, has been around for decades it's just cool now to use the word "AI" when branding a product/company.
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.
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.
Yeah, I'm moving away from it too. I loved everything about Notion 3 years ago and nothing about it now.
I love Obsidian and I really wish there was an enterprise-level hosting option for it.
If you're interested in real-time collaboration within Obsidian, check out Relay [0]. We just released an on-prem hosting of our collaboration server, and we have folder-scoped sharing. We're making Obsidian work for work.
[0] https://relay.md
How are you replacing the database feature?
Notion seemed cool until finding out that getting information into/out of it was more of a painful, messy chore than I wanted it to be.
After trying Notion and experiencing the 'lock-in' for myself, I switched to Obsidian years ago - no regrets. Combined with Syncthing, it works surprisingly well - offering graceful/seamless editing of the same Notes across Windows desktop and multiple Macs, updating to the other devices in essentially real-time.
Can't believe they shut down https://skiff.com/mail for a Gmail client :( I was a happy user of Skiff before Notion bought them.
Encryption went against their AI strategy
It feels like they'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's not as polished. My fave email client right now is Mimestream: https://mimestream.com/
More like "Notion Mail (for Gmail only). Notion Calendar is Google only. Notion Mail is Google only. I guess I shouldn't have expected them to do anything based on standards like IMAP.
Have a look at Marco. It's IMAP primitive and will work with any email provider. I'm a co-founder.
https://marcoapp.io
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.
If anyone uses Notion and really cannot stand their UX, I'd strongly recommend Whimsical: https://whimsical.com/ -- it can do a bit of Trello too.
Remember when people thought Superhuman was the next thing?
It still sorta..is?
I know of and have seen a lot of very important founders and CEOs who still all swear by Superhuman.
The same people who thought that sort of thing, probably over-invested.
Once they (investors) have realized that there is no growth or anything to extract, or a lack of further fundraising, then it is written off and they move on.
They need to work on growth.
they're certainly working on it in this comments section
I quite like this. The 'auto label' implementation seems to work well (better than others I've tried). The UI is dense too, fitting lots of emails on screen at once.
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'm not sure what I'd change but I find it surprising how little innovation there has been in that area.
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.
Seems mad to build this ahead of just adding usable task lists with assignments.
Surprised they launched this before the mobile app is ready. It doesn't make sense to have a bunch of organisational features available to me, but only when I'm at my laptop. I'd guess people are hardly at least 50% of their email from their phone.
Only for Gmail? no thank you.
I didn't see pricing on the page. How does this compare to superhuman?
Right now it seems to be pretty simple. It's free for most usage and has some AI features.
Edit: according to the pricing page, Notion AI can organize your inbox if you have the Notion AI add-on. Not quite sure if you can do this on free to some amount.
Is this integrating with Notion-Workspaces and their abilities? Because this could be really useful, but except the editor, I don't see any mention of regular notion-features.
For anyone who used both, how does this compare to superhuman?
I'll be keeping Superhuman thanks. But good for Notion.
Very disappointed that this is not an email client. It's just an alternative interface for Gmail.
This is very surprising, actually because many people in the B2B sphere don't use Gmail for their work email.
I'm really disappointed that Notion acquired and killed a far better product (Skiff) just to release what is essentially an overdressed Gmail client.
There'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 ```
And what does my exported data look like?
A PDF?
Notion has been great for me since I started using it back in 2021. Hope they get all the success they deserve.
That being said, I'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.
It'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's still a great product, but as time passes I look more into alternatives...
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”.
Is the company profitable?
Like many AI-driven products, the marquee use case they show is useless. "Job offers that require my signature"?? 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.
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.
I also like that the first screenshot on the page shows an email from "Finance Dept" with the subject "Expense report status" as a "Cold email". That example almost definitely has some back story to it, thus not making it a cold email.
That or it’s spear phishing.
Wow, that is a bizarre example? So bizarre I feel like I must be misunderstanding it. When does someone have multiple job offers in their inbox awaiting a signature? And it’s something you’re searching for as if you have to go through your weekly slog of signing job offers? Someone tell me what I’m misunderstanding.
I believe it's from the vantage of a hypothetical hiring manager.
That actually makes a lot of sense. What little you see of the emails they look completely different though - if ”I” sent them, you’d think they would be more similar.
and they get only 3 results?
Seems a little tone deaf for the current economy at the very least.
Couldn't agree more.
Regarding the job offer example. I'll have 1 to sign every 2-5 years, I should be able to manage that myself.
That said, I'd love a better email client that wasn't feeding an advertising company. I'm planning to spend some time with this to see if it fits any of my needs.
Edit: Oh, this is just a gmail wrapper/addon. Nevermind, moving along.
maybe this isn't what you're looking for since it is paid, but I am very happy with fastmail
edit: just realized I skipped a word while reading and you said client. I know some people use it to manage all email (including from gmail accounts) but that's not actually my use case.
100%, it is just a buzzword right now with so many companies trying to get in on the "action" without actually providing anything useful.
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Another day, another email OOPS, I mean GMAIL client.
It's quite sad when a testimonial mentions, "making the switch from Gmail," as if you're not still using Gmail?
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.
Their own Gmail client. I have yet to see one that works with normal email.
It makes sense though -- Gmail has little in common with normal email besides usage of SMTP transport, and has a lot bigger market share than normal email. (Exchange also doesn't count as "normal email" - so that's the reason for my confident assertion.)
I don’t think it makes sense, per se, considering Gmail’s ubiquity comes from Google offering it as a free product, and then all the barriers to creating an email provider being raised in an attempt to combat spam.
There’s barely any point in setting up your own provider now because you have to compete both with free. All the action has been around email clients which have typically been acquired and then crushed.
Google could have stuck with the protocol or presented a spec for it, rather than leaving the competition with IMAP and SMTP.
What makes sense is they dominated the market and helped put up roadblocks afterwards. EEE.
I wonder why that is. Are they using some features specific to Gmail? Maybe search so that they don’t have to maintain their own indices?
Gmail is like 30% of the email market and probably higher w/ their target demographic. Normal email is the not-normal email.
https://marcoapp.io
Is there an equivalent law for "every enterprise app eventually adds product management features"? Slack, Google Sheets and Miro are all guilty of this. I just want chat, pivot tables and diagrams but every update is like "we just added a Gantt Chart and Task Workflow templates guys!"
It does make a lot of sense though.
I have gmail for ages now and i do not switch over to iphone/apple or microsoft. I do wait for google to provide AI features on Gmail and GDrive.
If your central live tool is notion, i would want to have my emails in it too.
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