Notion shipped the permission everyone begged for

Hey,

Notion's been shipping agents nonstop this week, sub-agents that manage other sub-agents and meetings that write their own recaps. But we're starting somewhere else: the features you've probably ignored all year that have nothing to do with AI at all.

Then we'll get into the agent stuff, because some of it's genuinely worth your time. One deadline either way: Notion shuts off the old alpha agent routes September 30. That's eight days from today.

Let's get into it.

In Today's Email 👀

• Column permissions are here. Lock down the salary column, and keep your agents out of it too.

• Screenshot your whiteboard, get a roadmap. No more copy-paste.

• A Custom Agent that writes your freelance proposals (plus the prompt to steal)

3 Tips / Updates

1/ COLUMN PERMISSIONS ARE FINALLY HERE

Notion shipped column permissions on September 25. It's their #1 requested feature, and the launch post hit 206K views in 4 days.

You can now control who sees and edits each property in a database. Open a table view → click a column header → Property access. Set a default, then add exceptions by person, group, or agent.

Yes, agents too. Notion confirmed the rules apply to Custom Agents, not just teammates. That matters more than the salary column.

No more duplicate databases just to hide one field. Your HR tracker, CRM and hiring pipeline can finally be one database instead of three.

Watch out: anyone with Full access to the database still sees everything. Rules are set from table view only. And row-level permissions still aren't here.

Read the Property access docs →

2/ STICKY NOTES TO ROADMAP IN 2 MINUTES

Your team just filled a whiteboard with sticky notes. Normally someone loses an hour copying them into a database. Notion Agent does it from a screenshot.

Screenshot the board (FigJam, Miro, or a photo of a real wall) and paste it into a Notion page. Ask the Agent to turn it into a roadmap database. It reads every note, groups related ideas, and adds priority, impact and effort. Then it builds views by status, priority or theme.

It works because the Agent reads the whole page. Drop your team goals or last quarter's roadmap on the same page and it prioritizes with that context instead of guessing.

3/ A CUSTOM AGENT THAT WRITES YOUR PROPOSALS FOR YOU

For freelancers, the actual work has never been the hard part, it's the constant cycle of finding postings and writing a fresh proposal for each one. A Custom Agent template making the rounds is built specifically to cut that down.

The setup is one page holding a professional profile, background, services, rates, packages, how you actually work, and from there you just paste in a job posting. The agent reads it against that profile and drafts a proposal that references real experience and lands within your actual rate range, instead of generic filler. Every proposal it generates gets saved into a database that tracks the deal from outreach through closed, so nothing gets lost in a pile of half followed up leads.

A prompt worth building this around:

It won't decide what to bid or how to position yourself against other freelancers, that judgment still has to be yours. What it removes is the blank page every single time, which for anyone applying to multiple postings a week is most of the actual time cost.

From The Community

Notion Mail is actually gone now, not deprecated, not quietly unmaintained, just gone, and it landed harder than the four months of warning probably should have allowed. The inbox separation was the feature people keep bringing up as the real loss, something a lot of them haven't found a clean replacement for yet, mostly patching it together with filters in whatever they've moved to instead.

The complaint didn't stay contained to email though. It turned into a broader read on where Notion's been heading, AI everywhere, pricing that feels hard to justify for what you actually get, and a general sense that the simple tool people signed up for keeps getting buried under more complexity. A few people said they've basically moved AI work off Notion entirely, running their own agents elsewhere and just using Notion's API as a place to store the output.

Not everyone agrees it's that dramatic. One pushback worth including: Notion is still exactly as complex as you choose to make it, and most of the frustration comes from features people don't have to touch in the first place.

Quick Links & Tools

Sonnet 5.5 is in Notion, same day: Anthropic's new model runs 30%+ faster than Sonnet 5 and costs up to 30% less per task. Notion shipped it the same day. Early users say it's filed under "Older models" in the picker, so scroll down.

Muse can now use Notion: Muse can now track your to-dos, pull context from your workspace, and move projects along inside Notion. Another agent that treats your workspace as its memory.

New sidebar in the Notion Agents app: The Notion Agents iOS app got a redesigned sidebar, rolling out now. The catch: early reports say it forgets your last model and resets to "Auto" every time you reopen it. Double-check before you run anything expensive.