Workflow for writing emails in Obsidian and sending via Outlook, maybe with pandoc?

Hi,
just copy+paste the markdown text from Obsidian to Outlook, doesn’t work, because you’ll get plain markdown text in outlook.
So I tried to use pandoc to export my note to html, because Outlook understands html.

The problem is, which makes that workflow not handy enough:

  1. with the pandoc-plugin, you just can convert a hole note to html, not just the selected part of a note
  2. when exported to html, there will be a new html-file created, which I have to open, copy the text from and paste it into outlook
    => thats too many steps. It would be nicer to just hit the pandoc-command to export to html and have the html-code in the clipboard, which then you can paste into outlook…

Okay… I tried to describe a possible workflow to write Emails in Obsidian and send them via Outlook… - but maybe there are much better alternatives?

Can you help me? :slight_smile:

Thanks in advance,
Silias

If you’re on iOS or Mac it could be done with the Shortcut Launcher plugin and a shortcut.

I would really like to hear more about this. I’m on MacOS and inability to send emails right from Obsidian is becoming a limiting factor for me using the tool in an office environment.

Read the Shortcut Launcher README for instructions on that part. It lets you create Obsidian commands to send the note, selection, or a variety of other things (or a combination of them) to a shortcut. You can make multiple commands. It’s a little complicated to read because of the various options, but that only matters when you’re setting up a new launcher.

In the shortcut you’ll want to use the Make Rich Text From Markdown action and the Send Email action.

Unfortunately I’m on Windows… Are there any possibilities for Windows?

Here I got a nicer workflow for windows with notepad++

Steps:

  • Copy/Paste your mail from Obsidian to Notepad++
  • Click Button MarkdownViewer++
  • Click Button Send/HTML to clipboard
  • Paste it into Outlook

Result:
Muuuuch more convinient than my old way, but still, there could be a nicer way to include the email-writing-workflow into Obsidian :slight_smile:

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Thank you!

Another plugin to the rescue, couldn’t be easier: GitHub - jenningsb2/copy-as-html: A simple plugin that copies the selected text to your clipboard as HTML

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You can copy from the note when in preview mode, and paste it directly into Outlook. Just make sure your Outlook accepts HTML formatted pasting.

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Doh, I should have remembered this.

GitHub - jenningsb2/copy-as-html: A simple plugin that copies the selected text to your clipboard as HTML works well, but is there a way to also copy over inline images (preferably using the custom sizes specified inline such as the 200 in [[imagefile|200]])?

Yes, Pandoc would help you get it into basically any format you like! The most obvious option would be what other folks suggested, going the HTML email route.

An option I’ve been considering is just going straight to plain Markdown syntax. It’s easy enough to understand as is, with hashtags and asterisks and so on, and increasingly mainstream software is using or supporting it (Wikipedia, MS Teams, etc.)

But I do really hope for a client in Obsidian! The more I can use it, the better.

Other things to look into are how Outlook can export to Excel, how a formula can send emails from Excel, or how to do it with PowerShell. Until we can get a client in Obsidian, there is almost assuredly a decent workflow that can be managed through those channels. I’m confident Python or JavaScript can also build little scripts / macros that would work, too. I’m no pro or expert, but frankly I’m confused why this hasn’t already been solved :confused::thinking:

Markdown was partly inspired by the things people used to do to informally format emails (back when email was only plain text), so using it in your emails has precedent. :slightly_smiling_face:

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A little googling found that apparently JS doesn’t support sockets (I don’t really know what that means), so doesn’t support email. I think there are some workarounds or packages or whatever that can help, but it may require something like Python through a plugin…

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