The most promising new email app I’ve seen in years

08/30/2024, 7:45 AM
fastcompany.com

Hello! Starting this week, this newsletter is changing—only a little, I promise. Each week will bring you a few shorter items rather than the single longish one you’ve usually received in the past. The result will be more variety and, I hope, more opportunities to hear from you with feedback, takes, and tips for future newsletters.

As always, thank you for reading, and I’m eager to hear from you. Drop me a line at [email protected].

Before we proceed, a few Fast Company tech stories you may not have seen:

Apple Intelligence launches this week. How to get it, and what you can do with it
A growing network of influencers are pushing Ozempic
TikTok teens are choosing colleges based on which campus offers the best video background

Notion does email

For a tool that’s both essential to work and far from universally beloved, email has proven surprisingly impervious to reinvention. Truly fresh approaches come and go. Mostly, though, the competitive field is what it’s always been: Gmail, Outlook, and a whole bunch of alternatives that—even when they offer something useful—do it in a way that looks a whole lot like Gmail and Outlook.

And then there’s Notion Mail. Given that Notion acquired email startup Skiff last February, it’s not a shock to see it enter the category. But its app, which it unveiled last week at its Make with Notion event in San Francisco, isn’t just a relabeled Skiff. Instead, it aspires to be something I’ve never seen before—a tool kit for putting together an email experience that’s highly customized to your own needs and whims.

I say “aspires” because Notion doesn’t plan to make Notion Mail fully available until next year. At present, you must join a waitlist to gain access to a preview version that requires you to have a Gmail account and runs only on Macs and Windows PCs. The company acknowledges it’s a very rough draft; I won’t even consider switching to it until it I can use it on my iPad.

Still, spending a few days with the preview edition greatly whetted my appetite for what’s coming. Notion Mail is the first big new idea in email since 2020’s Hey, which remains my primary client for the time being.

Overall, it bears a close familial resemblance to Notion’s namesake product. At first blush, that app looks like a notetaker akin to Evernote, and you can certainly use it that way. But Notion’s ultra-flexible templates can turn it into a social-media scheduling system, a meal planner, an attendance tracker, or practically anything you or someone else can dream up. Software does not get much more flexible than this.

Notion Mail isn’t there yet: It’s starting out with 17 templates compared to Notion’s 20,000-plus, and there are limits to how radically you can rework the standard interface. Already, though, you can create new views that organize your inbox via principles other than strict reverse-chronological order, such as by sender, label, or read status. You also have some control over the columns of information that appear in a view, allowing you to strip it down to a minimalist view. Or, if information density is your thing, you can add even more elements.

The app also has Autopilots, which are AI-powered rules that let you sort mail using prompts such as “Show only emails that relate to recruiting.” As in the main Notion app, there are canned elements called snippets that can include data fields, allowing you to insert typical email elements such as Zoom invites without typing the whole thing every time. You can insert a scheduling button—Notion launched a calendar app in January—rather than devote a whole email thread to the rigmarole of coordinating a day and time. Inevitably, it’s possible to draft emails using AI, an option I haven’t yet delved into because I’m dreading the day it might seem reasonable to me.

Not everything currently implemented in Notion Mail is easy to figure out, and some stuff I tried does not appear to work at all. But if the company builds out this product to its logical conclusion, everybody who uses it will be able to tinker with its functionality and craft their own user experience in a way that’s unusual with software of any sort and unheard of with email. That might be more effort than many people are willing to make, but I for one will gladly find the time.

I also hope that Notion sees this product as a major long-term investment. Email is one of the biggest challenges a software company can give itself: It will be tough for Notion Mail to go anywhere unless it’s as good as Gmail and Outlook at all the basics, and far better in some respects. Even the first official, publicly available version of the app may not meet that bar. Having hatched something with so much potential, it would be pretty sad if Notion lost interest before truly delivering on the concept.

Dreaming too big: The Evernote story

Attending the Make with Notion event last week, I found myself surrounded by attendees with a deep emotional attachment to Notion, an experience I found invigorating even though I merely like the app myself and don’t currently use it as my primary notetaker. (At the moment, I’m using the simpler and more streamlined Bear.) At lunch, I sat across from a woman who’d traveled all the way from El Salvador to attend the event—quite a trek to make for a piece of software.

Living inside Notion’s world for a few hours reminded me of the era, more than a decade ago, when Evernote was a hot startup and held annual user conferences in San Francisco. I attended several and ended up writing about one in a print-magazine feature for my then employer, Time.

Back then, loving Evernote was so much of a lifestyle for its fans that it started selling messenger bags and wallets—nice, pricey ones, not trade-show swag—and talked about being around for a century. “Nike broke out and became the first worldwide, mainstream brand for people who care about athleticism,” CEO Phil Libin told me in 2013. “We want the same thing, to be the worldwide signature brand for people who aspire to being smart.”

Evernote also offered its employees fringe benefits that were over-the-top even by Silicon Valley standards, such as free house cleaning and a subsidy on EV purchases. During one of my visits, the in-house sushi chef had just quit and the air in the office was positively funereal.

At some point along the way, it became clear that Evernote hadn’t paid enough attention to the core job of keeping its note-taking app evolving and improving. By the time I wrote about the company again in 2018, it was trying to do that, and the messenger bags and other diversions were long gone. By then, however, the aging phenom had lost most of its momentum in a category it helped popularize. In 2022, it ended up selling itself to an Italian company that shut down the U.S. operation. The app remains extant, but all its early great expectations turned into faded memories.

To bring this back to Notion: The 8-year-old company has rekindled some of the same fan-favorite energy that fueled Evernote’s heyday. The bevy of announcements it made at its conference feel like they’re part of a general campaign to turn the popular app into the foundation of a top-tier, all-encompassing productivity environment—not an exact counterpart of Microsoft Office or Google Workspace, but something more modern, AI-fueled, and powerful. That presumably helps explain why it’s gotten into email and calendaring even though every Notion user already has email and a calendar.

I do worry a little about Notion taking on so many things that it can’t do any of them well. For now, the fact that it seems to be pouring all its energy into product evolution is a hopeful sign. It’s almost as if it’s becoming what Evernote could have been if it had shown more discipline. Here’s hoping the parallels between the two companies never involve the launch of Notion-branded luggage.

Read/Listen/Watch/Try

In this new Plugged In section, I’ll recommend articles, shows of various sorts, and apps—anything I’m enjoying this week. Got any recommendations? Let me know: [email protected].

Ben Thompson of Stratechery has a good piece on why Meta may be poised to be one of AI’s biggest beneficiaries.
Max A. Cherney, Jeffrey Dastin, Dawn Chmielewski, Fanny Potkin, and Stephen Nellis of Reuters reported some of the missteps made by Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger as he attempts to undo years of poor decision-making at the fabled chip company. (Back in 2022, in an earlier phase of Gelsinger’s quest, I wrote my own long story about it.)
Sixty-four years ago this month, CBS aired a TV special on the bold new technology known as artificial intelligence. Despite its quaint vibe, it remains a surprisingly relevant introduction to the topic. You can watch the show on YouTube or read my appreciation of it from 2019.
The best $1.99 I’ve spent lately was on Arcadia, a delightful collection of 22 1980s-style video games for the Apple Watch. They involve everything from zapping aliens to bowling, and are beautifully tailored to the watch’s tiny screen and limited means of input. The same developer offers a Game Boy emulator for the Apple Watch that’s an even more mind-bending achievement.