A year and a half after it launched Notion Mail, Notion is shutting it down.
On September 22, the Notion Mail inbox goes dark across web, desktop, and iOS. Notion bought its way into email, built a really promising client on top of it, and is now walking back out.
That’s unfortunate if you were hoping for an Email Client that had the design, feel and craft of Notion.
Functionality-wise however, agents & AI are probably changing email so much anyway that you won’t really notice the difference.
What’s actually happening
Your email isn’t going anywhere. Notion Mail was always a layer sitting on top of Gmail, two-way synced — so every message is still in your Gmail account, exactly where it was.
What changes on September 22:
- The inbox UI shuts down on web, desktop, and iOS.
- Drafts and scheduled emails in Notion Mail don’t carry over. Export them by September 21 if you want to keep them.
- Notion agents that handle email keep running — your email connection inside Notion stays in place.
- Notion Mail Auto-Label will stop working, so you’ll need to migrate to Custom Agents instead.
So you don’t lose your emails, but you lose an email client that was built to bring Notion’s philosophy to your inbox.
How we got here
Notion acquired Skiff, a privacy-first, end-to-end encrypted email company, in February 2024. The Skiff team created the foundation for Notion Mail which shipped in April 2025: customizable, AI-native, Gmail-only.
It was an exciting release and a look into what email could look like with an inbox that put you in full control – similar to Notion.
But the early excitement wasn’t followed by many product updates and it always felt as if Notion Mail remained in a permanent alpha. Even more so when the people who built it left. Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg — Skiff’s founders, who led Notion Mail — went to Cursor, then to xAI.
An inbox and a workspace are different products
This change doesn’t mean that Notion won’t be able to handel Email – but it changes the surface and role that Notion wants to play in that setup.
An inbox is where a person processes email.
A workspace is where email becomes context for a team.
Those are two different products, and Notion was trying to build both at once. The inbox is the half it’s letting go.
That is unfortunate, but it fits with Notion’s actual job and the way they’re reinventing themselves for the AI age.
Notion wants to be the place where your business becomes readable — projects, decisions, clients, the context you, your human team members and your agents act on. Email matters to that job only insofar as the right messages land in that context. Whether you read them in a Notion-branded window doesn’t matter at all.
It also fits into their new strategy of opening up the platform, rather than building everything themselves.
At the developer day 2026, Notion announced a series of fundamental changes: external agents like Claude Code and Cursor running inside Notion, Workers, a developer CLI, database sync from your other tools.
The pitch was “any data, any tool, any agent — all in Notion.”
Does this hurt Notion as a CRM?
For a long time, our answer to “should you run your CRM in Notion?” partly came down to email. A CRM needs email in it, and Notion Mail looked like the obvious bridge.
It isn’t anymore — and it was never the best bridge anyway. For the clients we run on Notion, we stopped using the default Mail integration a while ago. A custom pipeline pulls in exactly the emails that matter, shaped the way that team actually works.
With agents and Workers, that’s easier than it has ever been. You don’t need a native inbox to get email into Notion. You need a pipe — and you get to decide which emails, which database, what shape.
What to do now
If you just want a great email client, then these are some interesting options to check out:
- Cora, built by Every, screens your inbox down to the messages that genuinely need you and sends a short brief twice a day. They are just about to re-launch as an actual email client.
- Superhuman if you want raw speed (Gmail and Outlook).
- Shortwave if you want AI-native with its own automation layer.
- Proton Mail if privacy is the priority, or HEY if you want the deliberate opposite of AI-everything.
- Spark even keeps a built-in send-this-email-to-Notion button, if that one feature is the thing you’d miss.
If you want email to live inside your operating system — Notion — don’t wait for a native rebuild that isn’t coming. Pipe it in.
A Custom Agent or a Worker can drop the right messages straight into the right database, ready for your team and your agents to act on.
That’s the setup behind every Notion CRM we build — and it’s more control than Notion Mail ever handed you.
The bet underneath all of this
Losing Notion Mail stings if you wanted a beautiful Notion-native inbox. I did.
But that’s the strategy of the company – and I’m excited to see what a bigger focus on the core product will bring over the next few months.
The question at the end of the day isn’t which email app do I switch to. It’s what should my agents do with my email once it’s in Notion — because that’s the part that’s about to get interesting.
