Email From Note, a new email-to-vault service (in development)

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Update 2025-10-27: Not enough public interest, project cancelled. :man_shrugging:t2:

Hello all. I’m Carlo, the creator of iOS/macOS app Actions For Obsidian[1] and a few FOSS Obsidian plugins[2], among other things. Right now, I’m working on a new thing, it’s called Notes From Email, and I think it might be of interest to some of you:

https://notes-from.email?ref=obsidian-forum-showcase

Basically, I’m building a hosted service that turns every email it receives into a new note in your vault, with its attachments intact. You’ll get a new, unique email address, and when you want to save an email to your vault, you forward it there. In your vault, it will be saved as a new note with the subject line as the title, and its attachments linked in the note body.

(Remember Evernote’s email-to-notebook feature? Yes, that.)

You might have questions, and I’ve tried to anticipate and answer a couple of them on the site (Why? Encryption? Free? etc.), please see the FAQs.

Right now it’s very much a work in progress, and I try to gauge the level of interest so that I can plan accordingly.

To be perfectly honest, I have no idea if a service like that makes sense in 2025, outside of my little filter bubble. :thinking: So please, if you have an opinion on that, or if a service like that is something you can see yourself using, please let me know. Just reply here, join the related newsletter/ waitlist, or send me an email to [email protected].

Thank you for your time, I appreciate it.

  1. Actions For Obsidian ↩︎

  2. ActionsDotWork — Productivity Tools for macOS & iOS ↩︎

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Well, there’s not that much interest, it seems. That’s an important data point for sure. :wink:

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Receiving emails would be great, but a separate web-service for that is something I would not like to rely on. I would very much prefer some local plugin that would be able to download emails from imap server or something like this, like Thunderbird and similar mail apps do. I’m actually currently trying to figure up how to do this using the imap-flow library for Node, but it is a bit complicated.

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Thank you, @reaty – that’s an understandable stance, at least for tech-savvy people. The “I just want to take notes” crowd is probably less technically inclined, and I was thinking about them as the likely target demographic. I’m starting to think I was wrong, and these days there’s no need for such a service after all. Again: That’d be a good lesson to learn before starting to work on it for earnest. :wink:

I appreciate you taking the time answering, seriously.

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Literally created a separate account just to reply to this.

Background:
I work in finance. I used to getting like 5-10 emails a week, so ive never had this problem before. Recently, i got put on a project, and im getting close to 50 emails a day. No matter how hard i try, i literally cannot keep track of everything. Conversations, replies, forwards. Managing a process for multiple teams at once. It’s too much. My work email has such heavy restrictions on what I can link my email to (almost nothing) and what i cant. I couldnt find anything.

fast forward to today and roughly 50-100 hours of vibe coding later (i have absolutely no experience writing code whatsoever). I created a system when i use powerbi to pull my emails via api (vibe coded a way to flatten the email so all recipients, attachments, and recievers) are a single row. Connected that powerbi query to excel (critical that it refreshes in powerbi web because the query pull is too taxing on my computer.

Then vibecoded a powershell script to run through that excel document, and pull all relevent information, with clickable properties for people, conversation topics, dates, etc. While mirroring my exact folder structure in outlook.

Im still working on the kinks, but essentially, i’m on the verge of creating this “second brain” where i have an interconnected email database with notes, that I connect to other notes, etc.

and im almost there! gahh., would have loved a prgram that would have done it all for me. but just thought i’d share.