Notion Mail is out(notion.com) |
Notion Mail is out(notion.com) |
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.
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.
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...
A PDF?
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
I was surprised that our auditors wanted to re-do Soc 2 for our second product rather than just apply it to the company.
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!
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.
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)
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.
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.
The four types of factors are: something you know, something you have, something you are, somewhere you are.
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.
also, aren't 'app passwords' or whatever they call it still a thing?
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’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.
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.
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...
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?
(Notion + Workspace would be an incredibly strong offering for startups ... if it was all integrated/owned by the same company)
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.
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.
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.
I love Obsidian and I really wish there was an enterprise-level hosting option for it.
[0] https://relay.md
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.
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.
I know of and have seen a lot of very important founders and CEOs who still all swear by Superhuman.
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.
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.
This is very surprising, actually because many people in the B2B sphere don't use Gmail for their work email.
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.
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.
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.
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’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
We're building https://marcoapp.io
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.
> 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.
And if you do want actual enterprise tier, lots of startups and even public companies use Google suite for all their teams.
Except for Gmail?
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.