Notion Email Intelligence
Terrible name, pretty good app
Free Developer Notion AI, notion.ai Platform Universal Requirements iOS 9 or later
Email is a pain in the apps. It’s hard to find something that suits your specifications – perhaps you use it for keeping in touch with family, or for your job, or for running a business, but whatever you use it for, it always feels like the app is optimized for someone else.
Notion Email Intelligence apparently “learns your behavior” to tailor its service to you. It certainly works pretty damn well, especially for something that’s free. The main draw of the app is that it uses artificial intelligence to figure out who and what is important to you. It’s not entirely obvious how it does it, but after 25-60 minutes of thinking about it when you first set up the app, it does pretty well. It’s a little creepy having a list of “people that are the most important to you,” especially if it’s a business email account and it starts rating your clients as 10/10 in terms of closeness, but sure. It works.
You can, with just one swipe, archive, flag, and mark emails as read. Once you get used to which direction does what, it makes going through emails an absolute breeze. There is a “Radar” tab, too, which is absolutely fantastic (as long as it works) – it picks up on questions within your emails and flags them up for you, telling you to respond ASAP and monitoring other people’s delayed responses. It even prompts you to respond to new questions within a certain time, presumably to get better at email!
Notion has some issues, mostly to do with its simplicity. It’s hard to figure out how to tell the app who is important to you if it’s already decided that they aren’t. “Unimportant” emails are gray, and can be archived in bulk, but if there are important emails in there you might accidentally archive those, too. You can also filter by which emails are starred, but not by unread. There are also options like “Insight Signature” which offers to add relevant statistics to “encourage responses,” but that’s terrifyingly vague.
All in all, Notion Email Intelligence – despite being slightly obfuscated by its minimal design – is an excellent way to manage email, even if it’s perhaps best paired with another email app to make sure nothing slips through the cracks. the bottom line. A useful, thoughtful email app that makes sure you only see the most important messages.