Email Notes to Obsidian
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Introduction
Obsidian is a powerful knowledge base on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files.
I have been using obsidian for several months as a personal knowledge base, research, and writing tool.
The key benefits that I have found to date are,
- Automatic internal linking (wiki-links)
- Powerful search
- Plugin support
- Storage using plain text files
One of the really useful features of competing solutions like EverNote is the ability to create notes via email.
In this post, I describe how I have added the ability to create notes in Obsidian through email.
Implementation
My Obsidian vault is stored in a Microsoft OneDrive folder. OneDrive is a file hosting service that synchronizes defined folders on a local Windows machine, cloud storage, and any number of other hosts.
Storing my Obsidian vault in OneDrive enables me to,
- Use Obsidian on multiple computers
- Enable external applications (including IFTTT) to interact with files in the vault
The IFTTT service will be used to,
- receive email messages from a nominated email address
- extract information from the email message and create a .md (markdown) file
- save the markdown file in a nominated folder in the Obsidian vault
IFTTT
IFTTT (If This Then That) is an online service that enables user-defined integration of web services.
Configuration
The following simple workflow is crated in IFTTT,
The ‘Create Text File’ step is configured to,
- Connect to my OneDrive account
- Create a file named as per the email subject line
- Save the file into the ‘emailed-notes’ folder in my Obsidian vault