Email client for Obsidian

Hi @pshev, may I ask how you achieve using iframe? Is it using a separate client in your machine? Apology, I am not a developer so can’t imagine how this works. Hope to hear from you soon.

no iframe

why? Because I want my data especially all the meta data attached to an email. i want every email in my own vault. I want to be able to have every email sent or received as a note so I can use all these wonderful tools that OBSIDIAN has enabled for us

even if I could get a importer/exporter of my email so that I can deep dive into my email data would be very enlightening.

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Yes for RSS only if there is an option for downloading for offline use (not just a summary and read more link) and tagging saved/favorited articles.
Having an email within obsidian would be interesting to see especially if it’s easy to work with/manage.

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I recently integrated my emails (Gmail) into Obsidian using a custom version of the Smart Connections plugin. If you’re unfamiliar, Smart Connections uses AI to surface the most relevant notes based on the currently active note.

I have been extending that functionality to my content outside of Obsidian, like Gmail and WordPress.

If you’re interested in integrating external content like this, please comment on this GitHub issue for the Smart Connections plugin with the platform you want to integrate.

In the top right of the screenshot below, you can see what my private Gmail integration looks like. Clicking links to the message in Gmail.

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every day, in every way, more and more of my digital life is kept within Obsidian.

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Personally, I think it would be very interesting for someone to port Joplin’s excellent thunderbird addon to Obsidian.

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Done right, that would be amazing, especially when used with a separate vault specifically for email. I’m picturing it being a bit like MailMate, but more powerful, flexible, and customizable—and cross-platform, with mobile as well as desktop apps.

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What about forwarding an email to Obsidian? I could forward an email to my obsidian email address, where a note would be created for each email. Can this be achieved somehow, maybe with one of those IFTTT services?

Edit: Found this medium post but I can’t read it. They use IFTTT.

Edit: Found this plugin as well.

Edit: Omnivore seems to work too

Yes thanks. But i’am thinking about a local solution not depending internet connexion.

That’s sounds great! How do you do that?

Generally you want to use solutions like Omnivore to save and capture emails for later use. If you don’t want that, then you need to use your own capture script which uses one of these apis:

If you can switch to Obsidian while capturing email, then you can use various plugins for capture:

There is also Global Hotkeys plugin which allows you to use Obsidian without first switching to it. In general I would recommend switching to Obsidian first and then running your capture since you want to perform different types of captures - not just one single type. In Obsidian you could have set 10 different shortcuts for your captures or you could use cmd + p to perform your specific capture (there is no point to set 10 custom shortcuts if you could just use cmd + p for everything).

Hi,

i’ve done this and you can find more information here:

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I just ran into this thread and thought I’d share my views - Excuse if they appear like a shameless plug(in):

In the last months, I was building a web service that would help me share documents/notes with others from various teams (think, me being freelancer, and others being clients. sharing contracts, specs, code whatever).

So this centralized service (relay.md) works the way that you would add a property (relay-to) and have the service deal with sending the data over to other people’s vaults.

I was thinking about extending this to allow sending emails to those that do not have Obsidian but need to see the note. With that, I was also thinking about how this could help me make my Obsidian setup more like a communications platform with all my knowledge in the same place as my comms with integrations into medium, github/gist, twitter, webhooks … you name it.

It would still not be able to read your emails or even connect to your IMAP/POP3 server, but it might (so i was thinking) - solve a problem for some.

I hope I didn’t derail the thread - still, would love to hear your thoughts.

It’s an interesting idea but wouldn’t really solve the core concept in this thread (a way to send and receive email messages with Obsidian).

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That’s what I thought. Thanks for confirming. If you want me to remove my post, let me know.

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Hey, I was directed here from a Mastodon toot and thought I might be able to contribute some news of interest. It’s not an Obsidian extension per se but instead I’ve created an email clipper an add-on for the Thunderbird email client. You can read more about it in this forum post. If you have any questions or comments, please let me know there or at the project’s GitHub page.

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I think the key functionality would be for Obsidian to be the index to all the other parts of my life: email, notes, texts, social media, files, etc. I originally tried a version of this with Keep It by importing all emails, files, etc and organizing via tagging, but keeping up with the flow of email threads became overwhelming. The product Hookmark has the right, IMO, concept by being a centralized index of all information for various projects, but their implementation doesn’t work on mobile (you can view but not add links) so I don’t think that is a viable long term solution. Something like this sounds promising. Leave the original data in place in the apps that are best suited to handling those data types: email clients, message apps, etc, but create text-based representations of those in Obsidian with links back to the original, so if I’m looking at project data and there’s an email, I click the link and it takes me back to my email client to send the actual email, etc.

I also agree this view that Obsidian should utilize coexistence of other applications. This basically means two things: continuing enhancing Obsidian URI and actively promoting using URI schemes such as file URI scheme and URI scheme for default apps in Windows such as ms-screenclip:, ms-clock: and calculator:. See also this related FR:

In Obsidian files can be dragged & dropped into file: links by holding down ctrl/option Drag and drop - Obsidian Help

I like the idea, but I prefer a workflow solution rather than an Obsidian plugin. I’m not sure if a real client is a good idea. I receive a lot of emails, and I don’t want all my emails in Obsidian. And don’t forget, it’s a big security issue.
What about something like a Zapier workflow that converts emails into structured notes and assigns special tags to the emails?

Imagine you receive an invoice → send it to a special address, Zapier tags it as an invoice, gives it to ChatGPT → ChatGPT converts it into your special structure, sets tags, and gives it back to Zapier → Zapier then converts it to a .md file and places it in your vault in a special location, like an invoice folder or something similar.

Or do you want to send emails from Obsidian to the world? I don’t think this is necessary and it’s a big security hole.

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i feel this sort of thing could be part of a move towards obsidian being the centre of the data part of an AI driven personal assistamt.
i am however not sure if the right approach would be for all email to bome in to an obsidian plugin or whether an email client with an obsidian interface would be better. when an email needed to be referenced in obsidian you would signal that from the email client