Email Clients After Notion Mail: What to Move to Before 22 September

Notion announced in June that Notion Mail would close on 22 September 2026, and the reason it gave is the interesting part: more than half of its users, it said, were managing email through Notion's agents without ever opening the inbox. So the inbox goes, the agents stay, and if you were one of the people who actually liked the inbox, you have about a week to move.

We used Notion Mail for most of the last year. Here is what you need to save first, and where we ended up.

Do this before 21 September

Your email is safe. Notion Mail was a client for Gmail, not a mailbox, and it synced both ways, so every message you sent or received is already sitting in Gmail. What is not in Gmail is the layer Notion added on top, and Notion's own notice lists four things that live only in the app:

• Drafts — migrate them to Gmail from inside the app.
• Scheduled emails — same; anything queued to send after the 22nd will not.
• Snippets — export the text. No other client imports them, but the wording is the work.
• Auto-label instructions — export these too. If you spent an evening writing rules that sort your inbox, those rules are worth keeping in a document.

The last day to do any of this is 21 September. After the 22nd the apps for iOS, desktop and web stop working for everyone. Notion's suggestion for what comes next is its Gmail connector, which lets its AI search and draft from your inbox without a client at all. That is a fair option if you were mostly using agents. If you want an inbox, read on.

Superhuman: the closest match, at a price

If what you liked about Notion Mail was the split inbox, the keyboard shortcuts and the AI labelling, Superhuman is where that idea came from. Starter is $30 a month or $25 a month billed yearly and includes the split inbox, the shortcuts, AI writing, summaries, snippets and calendar. Business, at $40 a month or about $33 yearly, adds the things that map most directly onto Notion Mail's AI — auto-drafts, Ask AI over your mail, and custom auto-labels — plus CRM integrations.

It works with Gmail and Outlook, which matters if you are not purely on Google. It is fast in a way that is hard to describe until you have used it and then hard to give up. It is also, for one person paying yearly, $300 a year for an email client. Whether that is reasonable depends entirely on how much of your day is email. Superhuman now sits inside Grammarly's company, which we mention only because the last year has taught everyone to ask who owns the tool they are moving to.

Superhuman is what Notion Mail was imitating. If you want the original and email is your job, pay for it. If you handle thirty messages a day, you are paying for shortcuts.

Spark: the free one that does most of it

Spark is the one we would tell most people to try first, because the free tier is genuinely complete for a personal inbox: a smart inbox that groups mail by priority, unlimited accounts from any provider, smart notifications and a calendar, on iOS, Mac, Windows and Android with the same features everywhere. If Notion Mail's appeal was that it was free and did not look like Gmail, Spark's free tier is the direct replacement.

The AI is paid. Plus is $10 a month or $120 a year, which works out at $8.25 a month, and adds the Spark AI assistant with a monthly allowance of AI meeting notes. Pro doubles the price to $20 a month or $240 a year and adds unlimited meeting notes, read statuses, team collaboration and a HubSpot integration. Spark lists auto-labels, auto-drafts and workflows as coming soon, which is worth knowing: the specific Notion Mail features you are missing are on its roadmap, not in the product yet.

Shortwave: the AI-heavy option for Gmail

Shortwave is the client for people whose first question is how much of the inbox the AI can handle. It is built on Gmail, its assistant searches, summarises and drafts across your whole history, and it has AI filters that do the job of Notion Mail's auto-labels. The pricing has moved upmarket: Business is $30 a seat a month, Premier $45 and Max $120, each step buying more AI usage, more search history and more filters. There is a 14-day trial and no permanent free tier on the pricing page any more.

At those prices it is a team product with individual users rather than the other way round. If you want the most capable AI inbox and your company pays, it is the one to trial. If you are choosing for yourself, Superhuman does most of the same work for less.

Thunderbird: the one that will not shut down

The quiet lesson of the last two years, from Pocket to Omnivore to Notion Mail, is that a client built on someone's product strategy lasts as long as the strategy. Thunderbird is the opposite bet. It is free, open source, and funded by donations; its own site is explicit that it does not collect personal data, sell ads in your inbox, or train AI on your conversations. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, and since 2024 on Android, with any IMAP account including Gmail and Outlook.

It has no AI features, and the interface is functional rather than lovely. For some people reading this, both of those are recommendations. It is the client we point people to when they say they never want to do this migration again; we said something similar about Wallabag in our piece on life after Pocket.

Or just use the one you already have

It is worth saying plainly: Gmail's own web app is better than it was when Notion Mail launched. Summaries, drafting help and inbox categorisation are all there with a Google AI or Workspace subscription, and the categories and filters that do the sorting have been free for years. Outlook's new desktop app has the equivalent on the Microsoft side, and Apple Mail categorises and summarises on recent versions of iOS and macOS. None of them has a split inbox in the Superhuman sense, and none is as fast, but if you were in Notion Mail because it was free and pleasant, the free and pleasant option might be the tab you never closed.

Side by side

	Providers	Free tier	Paid	AI labels
Superhuman	Gmail, Outlook	No	$25/month yearly, $30 monthly; Business $33 / $40	Business plan
Spark	Any	Yes, full client	Plus $8.25/month yearly; Pro $16.58	Coming soon
Shortwave	Gmail	14-day trial	$30, $45 or $120 a seat	Yes (AI filters)
Thunderbird	Any IMAP	Everything	Donations	No
Gmail / Outlook / Apple Mail	Own account	Yes	Via your existing AI subscription	Categories, not custom rules

What we did

One of us went to Superhuman on the yearly plan, because email is most of their day and the split inbox paid for itself in a week. Two of us went to Spark free and have not felt the need to pay. Nobody chose Shortwave, purely on price. And the auto-label instructions we exported from Notion Mail are in a text file, which is where they will stay until Spark ships its version — at which point the wording, not the tool, is what we will have kept. If you are weighing that Superhuman subscription against the AI plan you already pay for, our comparison of the assistant subscriptions is the other half of that sum.