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Separate email for each notebook


MrShlomo

Idea

Currently, all emails I send to my Evernote "Email Notes to" address land in the "Inbox" notebook. I am suggesting to have a separate email address for each notebook, just like Todoist has a separate email for each project.

I know, it is possible to route an email into a specific notebook by adding "@notebook_name" to the email subject but in practice, this is inconvenient, time consuming, and error prone. you have to remember to use "@" (instead of "#" as it is in other applications). You have to type the notebook name correctly. You have to click edit subject + navigate to the end of it + type out the notebook name manually ...

For the Todoist projects to which I often email todos, I saved the corresponding email addresses into my address book, all prefixed with "Todoist - " - thus, when I start typing "Todo" in the recipient field, all of my email clients are giving me auto-complete suggestions for all Todoist project email addresses I saved. Very convenient, very fast to use, no danger of mistyping. I'd love to do the same with Evernote notebooks.

A nice side effect of not modifying the email subject: all common email clients are automatically grouping emails with the same subject into a thread (even if prefixes like "FWD:" are added). Thus, leaving the subject as is when forwarding to Evernote will attach this forwared email to the same thread as the original one, making it easy and convenient to check which ones you saved to Evernote already.

This feature request also reflects the desires of dozens of commenters on the following two feature requests. Yet, I decided to create a separate thread here because the other two are only mentioning this feature among others:

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It's worth pointing out that another use case for this feature is sharing. If my wife and I are collaborating on a project, I'd like to be able to give her (or my mom or sister, none of which are normal EN users) an email address which she can use to contribute notes to our shared notebook.

When I'm asking others to help me collect information for a project—whether it's taxes, recipes, or family documents—asking them to add a specific token to a subject line is one more point of complexity to include in the request.

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I know it's supposedly easy to add @Notebook to the end of of subject ... except

  • this is not possible with auto-forwarding filters in Gmail or other email providers
  • in the case of a misspelling/typo (or autocorrect on a phone) note goes somewhere else
  • you want someone to add notes that can't remember the syntax for notebook, they get frustrated and start to hate you for making them do this
  • I'm sure there are other reasons

I love the email forwarding feature, I use it daily.  I am fine if someone else thinks notebook-specific email forwarding address won't help them much, that's great that you don't have a need that's not filled.  For the rest of us, I'm sure this could be enabled without interfering with those folks' workflows. Perhaps this could be enabled with addresses like <username>.<random number>+<notebook>@m.evernote.com. Gmail and other use this syntax to help with filtering emails. The server ignores the part following the + for finding the right user.  Evernote could do similar, and make the parser look for this in to: address or for the @notebook in subject line when deciding where to put the note.  People who don't need the feature could just never use + syntax and carry on with their business as usual.

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And the difference between remembering an email address and a notebook is?  

In either case you could use a text expander like PhraseExpress to create a hotkey which would enter the email address and/or add the notebook name.  Have about eight of those myself, combination of adding notebook and tags to forwarded email subject lines.  

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On 8/5/2017 at 1:41 AM, csihilling said:

And the difference between remembering an email address and a notebook is?

Every modern mail client offers text expanding for email addresses stored in your address book without extra software and without remembering hotkeys. If you prefix the address book contact names with "Evernote - ", e.g. "Evernote - Wedding", "Evernote - Germany Trip 2017" etc., typing in "ever" will give you a nice selection of all the Evernote notebook emails you have, so you don't have to remember if it was "Germany Trip 2017" or "Germany 2017" or "germany_17" etc.

Also, keeping the subject line mostly unchanged allows the email clients to group the mails together (see second last paragraph of OP).

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On 2017-08-04 at 0:54 PM, MrShlomo said:

Currently, all emails I send to my Evernote "Email Notes to" address land in the "Inbox" notebook.

You’ve posted the request, and we will see if there’s support from the user base.  Voting buttons are in the upper left corner of the discussion.

Personally, I’m comfortable with my mail, clippings etc going to my Inbox Notebook for followup later.  

I realize there’s a school of thought about not handling the work twice but I don’t want any effort during “collection”  (GTD speak)

If I was concerned, I would add code to my email>Evernote script (Mac); a selected dropdown list for notebook/tag.  I can work with the current email feature

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34 minutes ago, MrShlomo said:

Every modern mail client offers text expanding for email addresses stored in your address book without extra software and without remembering hotkeys. If you prefix the address book contact names with "Evernote - ", e.g. "Evernote - Wedding", "Evernote - Germany Trip 2017" etc., typing in "ever" will give you a nice selection of all the Evernote notebook emails you have, so you don't have to remember if it was "Germany Trip 2017" or "Germany 2017" or "germany_17" etc.

Also, keeping the subject line mostly unchanged allows the email clients to group the mails together (see second last paragraph of OP).

Get all that, just not clear how many email addresses to notebooks one would have so as to make remembering a mnemonic difficult.  

Case in point, as a workaround I use PhraseExpress triggered by autotext for emails to EN, not so much for notebooks but for tags, pretty much the same concept.  Plus I clean up the useless lines on the front of the forwarded email.  

So ffama<space> in the To: area,

  1. Adds my EN email address
  2. Removes the fwd text from the subject
  3. Puts a date on the front of the subject
  4. Adds the notebook and tags to the subject
  5. Deletes the first 3 lines in the body

No muss, no fuss, no typos.  I have 15 of these, all easy to remember based upon the mnemonic.  A workaround that is reliable and does more than notebook assignment.  YMMV.

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Email addresses for each notebook is still not an Evernote feature

This feature is supported by third party Filterize

Filterize mail-in address

Filterize also offers you an address for every notebook. Just go to the mail-in page at Filterize and paste your Evernote email address there. Now, you can use the Filterize mail-addresses. Every notebook has a distinct one. This way you can setup your rules in the mail client to forward mails to the right notebook. Also you can use these addresses as recipient for newsletters, which will be stored in Evernote in the right notebook automatically.

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This is easy - it just needs to send it to the upload e-mail of the account, and add a „@oursharednotebook“ (replace this by the name of your notebook) after the header text. This is IMHO not really difficult. The „@something“ will send the E-Mail to the notebook declared after the @ -symbol. 

If she wants to alert you about the Mail in addition, she can add „#urgent“, which will create a tag „urgent“ attached to the new note. If you then search for the tag „urgent“, you will find the new note, and know what to do next.

Let us say: If you want to live a life of self-control, we better skip the last issue 🙃

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3 hours ago, VRN said:
  • this is not possible with auto-forwarding filters in Gmail or other email providers
  • in the case of a misspelling/typo (or autocorrect on a phone) note goes somewhere else

I use PhraseExpress when forwarding emails to EN.  I have about 10 mail phrases that clean up the body of the forward gibberish and add notebook and tags at the end.  Click on forward, hit the hotkey, click on send.  Reasonably painless workaround.

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On 1/27/2019 at 11:25 AM, DTLow said:

Email addresses for each notebook is still not an Evernote feature

This feature is supported by third party Filterize

Filterize mail-in address

Filterize also offers you an address for every notebook. Just go to the mail-in page at Filterize and paste your Evernote email address there. Now, you can use the Filterize mail-addresses. Every notebook has a distinct one. This way you can setup your rules in the mail client to forward mails to the right notebook. Also you can use these addresses as recipient for newsletters, which will be stored in Evernote in the right notebook automatically.

Just seeing this thread for the first time, but the solution to this problem was mentioned a year ago... Filterize does this and it works really well.  You also get a bunch of other features that can automatically tag or move notes, create tables of contents, etc.  Check it out.

https://filterize.net/

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I've been searching for an answer, but have not found one thus far.  With the use of the emailing, i would like to have notes replaced if possible.  Let's say I have a note titled: My Email, and I later want to add more to it, or someone replied, or changed something otherwise.  I want to then send this never version of the note by email, and have it replace the prior note version.  I don't want to end up with multiple notes of the same or similar title.  Is this possible in EN or out? (like filterize or other?)(i have spent a little time with filterize, but not extensively) 

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2 hours ago, nowell29 said:

I want to then send this never version of the note by email, and have it replace the prior note version.

What could possibly go wrong?
I'll stick with manual processing; it's a PITA but it limits losing important information

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I'm not sure I am following "what could go wrong".  I think for tidiness I would like to only have 1 note by 1 name, instead of having multiple notes with the same name.  Am I missing something as to why you don't see the value of what I want to accomplish?

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It would be updated content.  As if I had directly edited the note, but the edits or changes came from a different program, and now that there are these changes, I want it to go in and replace the same-named note with the most current version.  This is akin to a version controlled note.  But that sounds far more complex than it needs to be.  I know I can edit the existing note, but the idea is that the editing is coming from somewhere outside EN.

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45 minutes ago, nowell29 said:

It would be updated content.  As if I had directly edited the note, but the edits or changes came from a different program, and now that there are these changes, I want it to go in and replace the same-named note with the most current version.  This is akin to a version controlled note.  But that sounds far more complex than it needs to be.  I know I can edit the existing note, but the idea is that the editing is coming from somewhere outside EN.

Yeah, get that, valid request. 

OTOH, it requires some plumbing that EN would have to implement just in case the context of the incoming note does not match the existing note.  For example, forwarding trouble ticket exchanges to EN.  Sometimes it is just an updated email conversation, sometimes it is not.  That and how many users might want such functionality could impact EN thinking.

Not much of a workaround, but you can append an email to an existing note if you put the title of the note in the email subject with a <space>+ after it.  Still have to go to the note to delete the previous contents though.  FWIW.

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