Notion Mail is out - Hacker News

Posted by jasperr1 4/15/2025

101 points | 132 commentspage 2

tiffanyh 4/15/2025|

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)

artooro 4/15/2025|

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.

isaachinman 4/15/2025|||

I strongly suspect that is their goal. They acquired Skiff.

shauntest12321 4/15/2025|||

[dead]

827a 4/15/2025||

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.

stackskipton 4/15/2025||

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.

threetonesun 4/15/2025||

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.

dabbz 4/15/2025||

I honestly thought Salesforce was leaning this direction with Quip and Slack. Granted, Quip was never a good product. So I guess that fumbled.

h1fra 4/15/2025||

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.

m4tthumphrey 4/15/2025|

"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.

danielbln 4/15/2025||

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.

zenethian 4/15/2025||

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.

dtkav 4/15/2025|||

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

nashashmi 4/15/2025|||

How are you replacing the database feature?

Casteil 4/15/2025||

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.

jjevanoorschot 4/15/2025||

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.

nashashmi 4/15/2025|

Encryption went against their AI strategy

mattgiff 4/15/2025||

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.

Zaheer 4/15/2025||

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/

james_pm 4/15/2025||

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.

isaachinman 4/15/2025|

Have a look at Marco. It's IMAP primitive and will work with any email provider. I'm a co-founder.

https://marcoapp.io

coastalpuma 4/15/2025||

Is the interface in the screenshot how it actually looks? IMHO, really needs some more visual structure to the messages table.

rhubarbtree 4/15/2025|

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.

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