Forms, Layouts, Mail: Here's everything Notion just announced

Notion has come a long way from its humble roots. First launched as a simple note-taking app back in 2016, the company is well on its way to becoming a full-service productivity platform.

It launched a suite of new features at its Make With Notion conference yesterday, including Forms and Layouts, as well as updates to its Marketplace and AI assistant.

It also announced its first foray into email: a Gmail client it will officially launch next year.

Here's everything you need to know:

Forms and Layouts

Notion has introduced two new "building blocks" for its documents: Forms and Layouts.

As the name suggests, forms let users build forms and collect data within their Notion docs, removing the need for third-party extensions. Users can access, analyze, filter, and sort form data in Notion's existing database and table features.

Layouts give you more flexibility over the way your Notion pages look. You can now customize the layout of blocks to best display your content.

If the traditional one-on-top-of-the-other format doesn't suit your project, you can try displaying blocks horizontally instead, as the graphic below shows:

Updates to Notion Marketplace and AI

The Notion Marketplace, where community members can buy and sell templates, is getting a host of updates.

Native payments, safeguards, and analytics tools will simplify the process of selling templates and make it easier to track sales.

Customers will get better insight into what they're buying with reviews and ratings. They'll also be able to track purchases and request refunds more easily.

Notion is leaning heavily into AI after launching its assistant Nosy last month. But there's more to today's update than a Clippy-style mascot.

Notion is connecting its assistant to external tools like Slack and Google Drive. It's also working on a search function to help you better scour through Notion Databases, but it's not yet confirmed when this will launch.

Notion Mail

The platform's biggest update hasn't actually happened yet. Notion is building an email service it plans to launch as a Gmail client early next year.

This won't be a surprise to keen Notion followers, given that the firm acquired Skiff, a secure email service, in February.

Notion released plenty of details about its AI-driven Mail app at the conference. The firm wants the software to ease enduring email pain points like inbox clutter and unanswered follow-ups. It will integrate Notion Calendar to streamline scheduling.

Users will be able to use AI prompts to organize their emails and uncover key information buried in their inbox.

A "Views" feature will pool key messages, dates, and task lists related to specific themes. An example "travel" view displays flights, hotels, and reservations for an upcoming trip.

Mail will also highlight key dates in your inbox overview and summarize messages on hover.

Users can also manually tag and group emails according to priority, completion stage, and other categories.

Automatic replies will handle the simple back-and-forth of event scheduling and reply chasing. Users can also reply with suggested responses.

Gmail already offers some of these capabilities, but on a more limited scale. It bumps unanswered emails to the top of your inbox and adds certain travel bookings to your Google Calendar, for example.

It's not yet clear how Mail will integrate with other Notion products like its desktop and web apps.

Can't wait till 2025?

Although it won't launch officially for a few months, keen Reddit users have already found traces of the Mail app online, including a login page and a development environment URL.

To see some breadcrumbs for yourself, try typing mail.notion.so into Google Chrome. Right now, the URL triggers the download of a Chrome app called 'mail-web.'

The app directory contains logos, a property list, and a loader file. But, at the moment, it just opens a blank Chrome page.

If you want more satisfying updates, you can join an official waitlist for Mail.