One of the many ways to get stuff into your Evernote account is by sending notes to your personal Evernote email address. Today, we launched a big improvement to this functionality that lets you specify the destination Notebook and assign Tags to your emailed notes.
How it works
First, find your Evernote incoming email address. It’ll look something like [username].12345@m.evernote.com. The address is located under Account Info in the desktop versions of Evernote, under Settings in Evernote Web, and in the Sync tab of Evernote for iPhone. We recommend adding this email address to your address book or contact list.
Next, try emailing something into Evernote. In the subject line of your email, write the title of the note as you want it to appear in your account. In the same subject line, add one or both of the following:
- Use @ for notebooks: Use an @ symbol followed by the name of your destination notebook
- Use # for tags: Use a # symbol followed by the tag or tags you wish to assign. You can have multiple tags just make sure each one starts with an #
For example, Subject: Trip to Florida @travel #expense report
Would create a note titled Trip to Florida in my travel notebook, tagged with expense report.
Notes on this feature
- This functionality only works for existing notebooks and tags
- At this time, you cannot create new notebooks or tags with this feature
- In the subject line, always put the note title first, then add any notebooks or tags
- This feature will not work for notebook names that contain an ‘@’ or a ‘#’, and it will not work for tags that contain a ‘#’ in their name.
Resetting your email address
Your Evernote email is randomly generated to protect you from spam. If you ever want to change it to another random address, click “Reset incoming email” in the Setting section of Evernote Web. If you do reset it, don’t forget to update your address book.
313 Comments
Wren Keber
This is the best feature you’ve come out with all year!!
Lee
Yea!
Tom
Awesome — thanks!
Ben Smith
This is a great first step, but can we also get this capability through changing the email address too… I use a number of services that I point at my Evernote account to collect and store data (including my transcribed voicemail) and I simply can’t amend the subject line.
Stewart Midwinter
This saves me a bunch of filing work. Thanks!
Fokke Kooistra
This is a great feature!
I use Evernote for GTD and some of my notebooks start with the @ sign. If I email with @@Home notes don’t end up in @Home but the default notebook.
Could this feature be extended to use double @? Otherwise I will rename my notebooks.
Fokke
Olin
I would like to see this implemented for the clip.action (Send To) feature I’m currently using in Google Reader. Like to setup different sends to specific notebooks, tags, etc.
I hope that’s part 2!
Jim
Thank you so much for adding this in. Having let my Pro account slip over the past couple weeks, I was debating trying something else because it didn’t have this feature.
Now that you’ve added this feature, it’s time to start collecting more notes!
Thanks.
wentworth3
That is wicked cool!! I really like the way that Evernote keeps adding killer features to an already amazing product / service / program… Sorta hard to classify you guys these days. Not a bad problem to have!
Ann
ack – you guys are friggin’ geniuses. I love this!
Alexander
Is it necessary for me to type @notebook for my default notebook or can I just type the tag and hit send?
Andrew Sinkov
@Alexander Notes go into your default notebook unless you specify otherwise.
Doug
Excellent addition! Many kudos to you. God Bless…
LogopolisMike
Freakin’ awesome. When inputting new notes remotely, I almost always email my ideas to myself rather than opening up the app on the iPhone, and I’ve gotten used to “filing” email inputs as being part of my process for using Evernote. Getting rid of that step AND the ability to add tags when I create it (which will probably be even more useful to me) is awesome (as long as I can remember my notebook names – time to stop being cute with them)
I was just wondering last night at the bar if there was a way to do this that I didn’t know or if I could figure out how to automate it myself. I’m glad I went premium the other day since apparently it means you start reading my mind (and you apparently can read it in the future, since I doubt you guys were able to put together that functionality in the 15 hours that I thought from it)
Milos
Thanks. Life is much easier now
Glenn Farrell
Thanks team! I’ve been soooo waiting for this feature. Although I expected it to be like the search feature (eg tag:tagname).
Anyways, thanks heaps!
John
Nice, but I also use @ and # as tags and contexts. Any chance of making these account settings, or @@ and ## as someone else mentioned before?
princ3paul
WOW! GREAT! Thanks a lot. I enjoy 2 work with EVERNOTE!!!
Paul
rick L. Lambert
looking forward to using this feature. Im always needing to go to the desktop app and change things around after emailing. this will make it nicer. Thanks
Duglow
The fastest development response to a podcast question tweet I’ve ever seen
Intended or not, like the consistency with RTM. As always, evernote rocks.
Duglow
…and oh yes, I also appreciate the consistency with my filing system — I’ve replaced notebooks with macrotags (@networks, @baseball, etc).
evernote more than rocks.
Mark
This is great, but what happens when a notebook has a space in it? For instance, I have a notebook named “Travel Notes” — how do you use the “@” syntax to get into that notebook?
Andrew Sinkov
@Mark Typing @Travel Notes into the subject will send to the Travel Notes notebook.
Eric
Thanks, this is really great.
Bryan Aspey
emailing self now:
YES!!! @things that rule #evernote
RebootIT
Great addition to the Evernote feature set.
Review of this functionality and various tests about how it works is at http://flagit.wordpress.com/2010/03/16/power-mailing-to-evernote/
Lucy
WOW. I literally just emailed support asking about this feature yesterday. They didn’t mention anything about this!
Phil
Hate to seem ungrateful but I also would like to be able to use the email address as a means to direct notes into notebooks. For instance
[notebook].[username].12345@m.evernote.com
Now get to work! And thanks for a great product!
Andrew Sinkov
@Phil Thanks for the suggestion.
Bailey
Hey, You are the guy from the podcast!!!
Alexey
Awesome! This is useful.
philyer
# for tagging doesn’t work in Windows client.
I send an email named ‘TEST @MISC #Evernote’ to my account, and get a new note named ‘TEST #Evernote’ in the notebook ‘MISC’ but with no tag.
Andrew Sinkov
@philyer This new feature will apply existing tags to your emailed noted. It will not create new tags or new notebooks. It sounds like you don’t have an existing tag called “Evernote” in your account. First create the Evernote tag, then try re-sending that note.
philyer
So that explains it.
But why not let it be able to create tags and notebooks?
Ryan
What a great and extremely useful enhancement to a great product
jacobian
very nice feature.I have been waititing this.
Lauri
Great feature. One more request though. Could you add functionality to create to-do’s directly via email (syntax could be for example [] characters). This would allow easy setup of categorized to-do’s into Evernote via email.
nothingelseis
Love it. Very natural behaviour. Everything just as it should be.
norifumi
When I get possible to appoint a notebook and a tag in e-mail address, I am glad.
Jason
Thanks!, been hoping for this for some time.
BTW does anyone know ofa way to trim signatures, legal notices, etc from e-mails that land in notes.
Remember the milk has a nece “-end-” feature so that all that junk is not included in the final note. Is there something similar for Evernote?
Damien
Brilliant! Thanks again.
If only you were on my Nokia E71, I would not need to use email !
Might have to switch to iphone, Android or Blackberry then.
Dave Yuhas
Another limitation is that the destination notebook must be synced. You can’t send a note to a local notebook.
RickK
Fantastic!
You folks keep making a great system greater.
Cassandra
Yayayayayayayay!!!!!! Finally! Thank you!
Andrew
This is the only request I had and you came threw!!!!!!!!! Yes!!!!!!!!!!!
Andrew
Could “to do” be added this way also? That would be a nice future add on
benjamin6
so good! very very good
Mac Haley
Oh, my gosh! The recent improvements to the post to Evernote by email functionality are fantastic! Now, I just have to remember to include the name of the notebook and tags in the subject line of notes that I email into my Evernote account!
Thanks, keep up the good work, and have a great day!
Sterling Zumbrunn
Mega sweet!
This is seriously handy, as e-mailing notes is now my primary method for getting them into Evernote on the iPhone. The methods within the iPhone app itself are really annoying, sorry.
For one thing, I like that the EXIF data from e-mailed photos now tag the notes with the correct GPS coordinates. This is not the case for Camera Roll notes within the app (they pick up the coordinates from wherever you happen to upload the photo).
Is there any chance you can change the home screen in the iPhone app to a notes view ( or better yet, a notebooks list) rather than the new note view? Seriously, I think most users now prefer the e-mail method of note creation on iPhone, especially now with this killer functionality. The mail app is built into so many apps now, and it is faster and superior to e-mail a note rather than use the Evernote iPhone app’s note creation UI which is horribly clunky and takes way too many steps.
I imagine that the Evernote iPad interface will be more about note viewing than note creation, and I wish the iPhone app could follow in that direction. I think a lot of people use the iPhone app to refer to their notes library, rather than actually create new notes. Especially when you’ve made it so easy to tag and assign notebooks via e-mail!
Bravo! I agree with the poster who said this is the best update of the year!
Andrew Sinkov
@Sterling Thanks for the iPhone app suggestion. We’re working on some interesting things. Stay tuned.
Russ
This is great, thank you so much! I send lots of emails to my evernote account from my gmail. I find that searching Evernote works much better than trying to find something in gmail. the only problem has always been having to go back to Evernote and put the note in the proper notebook and tagging it. Thanks again!
Mornington
Amazing! I love the iphone app, but when I’m in other applications on the iphone (like Safari) I don’t like to switch so I have been emailing notes from them to Evernote and then dealing with “cleaning up” when I’m done. Now it’s just as good wherever I am. So good…
BTW, I like emailing notes _from_ Evernote too. It’s handy when I just want to share one idea without notebook sharing setup.
Chris
The notebook feature works great, but I am unable to get the #tag feature to work.
Subject> title @notebook #tag
sticks a note with “title #tag” as the title… it seems pretty simple, but somehow I’m messing it up. Any clue?
Andrew Sinkov
@Chris, my guess is that the tag you’re trying doesn’t exist in your account. This feature does not create new tags. The tag name must match an existing ones, otherwise it will be placed into the title as you’re seeing.
Chris
Ah — quite likely. I did not realize that distinction even existed… the client almost creates new tags too easily (typos -> new tags), but it makes perfect sense.
Thanks
Surcy
This is not working for me either. Here is an example of an email I sent to my Evernote account. Both the tag and the Notebook already exist in my account.
Fwd: Your receipt #173007520824 @Action #Daily Personal Tasks
Any Ideas?
Brent
Creating, editing and saving a document on the desktop causes this error message. Advice?
Unknown exception (com.google.gwt.xml.client.impl.DOMParseException: Failed to parse: b33bdec8-da51-4bb9-9b94-3cf8e90ac812<input onc) during operation (Update note).
Close
kevin
I don’t get it – How is this useful?
I have the Iphone Evernote app so can send anything from there,
and if I have the Firefox app so can send anything from the web when I’m on the PC.
Is this for those without a smartphone? Or, am I missing something here..?
Andrew Sinkov
Kevin, Emailing content into Evernote is a very popular way for getting stuff into your account. Many people use this when they’re at work and don’t have access to Evernote. Others simply prefer using their mail client to create notes that they’ll access later. The feature also makes it easy to forward important emails into your account. Say you get a travel confirmation or a receipt via email, now you can send into the Evernote notebook of your choice. This is only scratching the surface. Hope that’s helpful.
Kevin
Thanks Andrew, I’ll try those suggestions out.
Mundo Resink
Awesome, thanks!
Can you integrate this feature into Twitter as well? E.g.: DM myen new note @notes?
Andrew Sinkov
That’s an interesting suggestion. My concern is that with only 140 characters, added additional notebook and tag info would make Twitter unusable.