Email Notes to Obsidian

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