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.
291 Comments
Tim S
I love you for this!!!
Kara M
When you combine this with the evernote integration with Nozbe I’ll be able to clear my inbox in no time flat – what a wonderful new feature!
Toby Neal
Thanks so much for this.
Is there any chance of having another tag to change the Author from your email address using say %authour ?
Kevin Mullet (Photographer, IT Cubicle rat, Parent, Student)
This is wonderful. I’ve been wanting THIS ONE FEATURE ever since I started using Evernote. I’m about to get an IPhone, and can’t wait to use it there, too. I’ve just become twice the Evernote Zealot that I was yesterday.
-KwM-
Ken
I saw this at the Evernote site, but cannot access that at work (blocked by firewall). Thanks for all the details so I can send e-mails to the right notebooks.
This is making Evernote even more useful, I hope they add more.
Andria Tay
Fantastic!! This is a feature I’ve been waiting for. Thanks guys!
Dallas
Perfect. Thanks for adding this feature.
Jonathan Silverman
Woohoo! Excellent.
Don Campbell
I’ve been waiting for this feature – thank you!
Andreas @ nouvé
We LOVE this. Perfect. Weiter so…
Jim Sewell
This shows the greatest thing about Evernote – your dedication to making your tool the most useful it can be for us and continual upgrades without being content it’s “good enough”. This a great feature many will use, including me. Thanks!
subcorpus
nice feature …
have seen it requested in some forums …
appreciated …
Karen Rainey
what a fantastic feature! Thanks!
Barbara
Yay! I requested this on the support forum a month or two ago and here is is! Thanks.
Michael Lynton
will these new functions (the @ and #) work for notes posting from twitter to @myen also? I know this is talking about email posts, but just thought I’d ask. Looking forward to the new feature!
Andrew Sinkov
This feature is only meant for email. We considered Twitter, but if you started adding notebook and tag info to tweets, you wouldn’t have any room left for the message itself.
Cecil
This is great. HOWEVER, it would be infinitely more useful to have an email address dedicated to each notebook. I use evernote to archive a couple mailing lists I run (by adding the evernote emailing address to the list), and currently must manually move them into the right notebooks. I have no way of modifying the subject line in this situation.
Also, with dedicated emails for each notebook, I can BCC emails to evernote, without people getting weird stuff in the subject line.
Steve
Great idea. I agree that this would be helpful — I hope this feature gets implemented!
Jeffrey Herr
LOVE IT!!! Thanks so much. I used to put keywords in the body of the EMail so at least they were searchable. This takes that a step beyond. Nice… You guys ROCK!
Priyank
Great feature. This will simplify lots of my workflows.
Can’t resist to suggest a feature: filters in Evernote. Based on certain criteria notes goes into specific notebooks.
Barbara
I love this but it would be a bit easier to use on the iPhone if a different key than # was used for tags. That key requires an extra keypress after getting to the number screen. So if we could use either # (since you already chose that) or & (for example), that would be great.
Rob Lewis
Cecil has a good idea in the comments, but you don’t really need separate email addresses for different notebooks: you could just use the address format “myEmail+someText@m.evernote.com”. The “+” and everything between it and the “@” are ignored by the mail router, but can be parsed by the recipient to specify a notebook, tags, or whatever. I’m not sure if spaces are allowed in “someText”, and some other characters may be illegal (the “@” for sure), so the data format would have to be carefully designed.
You could actually implement this now if you have a Mac and an email address. Just create a rule for incoming mail, have it run an AppleScript that processes and reformats the message and forwards it to Evernote.
Anders Dahlberg
Great up date. But it would have been even better if you could write like this:
[notebook].[username].12345@m.evernote.com
That way I can have multiple entries in my address book and notes will automatically end up in the right notebook.
Keep up the good work
Anders
Julio
I can’t find my Evernote email address.
Andrew Sinkov
Julio, It’s located in a few places. If you use a desktop version, it’ll be in Account Info. You can also get there by click on the Monthly Usage meter. On Evernote Web, it’s located in Settings. Your address will be something like: [username].12345@m.evernote.com
Stanko
Thanks !
nothing to add nothing to remove, regarding this feature.
Susan M. Baker
I am trying to use the new e-mail function with hash tags – and the e-mails are going through, but the tags are not automatically registering – I have to go in and register them AFTER the e-mail comes through – I thought they were supposed to automatically show up in my tags list?
Please let me know.
Thanks!
Andrew Sinkov
This feature will not create new tags. You must already have the tag in your account for the feature to work.
Ryan
This is a WONDERFUL feature addition. It was actually one of the first things I looked for when I first started using en and it is great to see it. Thank you!
Now, my one request: I have lots of tags that use both the @ and # characters. I wish there were a way to escape these special characters when they are not desired, e.g. #”#sample” would be tagged #sample. (For the record, #@sample, does go to the tag @sample, so it is really just the # characters in tags that can’t be targeted through the current email input, but I imagine that is more a result of computer protocol than intentional, so I include it here.)
Also, in response to the people who want to be able to create *new* tags when using email input, I very much see the utility in this, but from my perspective, I would rather en not create a new tag (the current behavior), as a typo in a tag creating a new tag would be much worse for me than a note simply going to my inbox (saved search: no tags). So I prefer the current situation.
Thank you!
Rob
Thanks. Evernote is among the best software in terms of new development and user response. One question: when I send an email from Thunderbird on Mac Airbook, the Evernote appears as a .vcf card in note screen that you have to click on to read. Am I doing something wrong? I was hoping that it would appear as text note that would be easier to see and read at a glance and to insert in other text documents.
Devin
For some reason tags are not working. I tried many different emails with different subjects here’s an example:
This is what the subject look like
Trip to Florida @my notebook #expense report
This is what it shows in evernote
Trip to Florida #expense report
It went into right notebook but tags were put into title.
Andrew Sinkov
Devin, Do you have a tag called “expense report”? This feature only works for existing tags. New ones won’t be created.
Greg Elsey
Great feature, which will make Evernote that much better.
Shepherd Jim
Re the problem of not being able to create new notebooks or tags: I’m going to set up new catchalls — a notebook titled “pending” and a tag called “pending”. Then, when emailing in new content, if I’m unsure about the existence or spelling of notebooks or tags already set up, I’ll just apply @pending or #pending.
When I do get into Evernote for real it’ll be simple to check the “pendings” for notes that need re-organizing and final tagging.
Uireanta
Great innovation on a product that is consistently becoming more useful to me in a range of settings. However on my macbook there does not appear to be a hash key? I’m sure I’m missing something can anyone help?
tcullen
Andrew, how can I order the appearance of my notebooks in the notebook list? For example, I’m a GTD’er, and I want my nextactions folder to show up at the top. my notebook is named “2. nextactions” (which works) but i can’t get the new email feature to work – sending stuff from email directly to the notebook…help! thanks – love the Evernote
Andrew Sinkov
That capability is not currently available. Thanks for the suggestion.
tcullen
Thanks, Andrew…looks like it’s the dot in the notebook name that’s the hangup. I changed it to an underscore and now looks like that works. Unfortunately, i still have lots of other notebooks (and tags) using dots that I’ll have to change. BTW, is there a tag management feature on the roadmap? Otherwise, I am a HUGE fan – can’t wait to get the iPad this summer – Evernote looks like the PERFECT app for the new device. You guys keep up the great work!
Andrew Sinkov
We are looking into ways to improve the tagging experience.
Marc Zegar
I’m struggling to get this set up on my MAC desktop. The email account settings are not working. What are they? I understand the IPhone app well enough but the computer part is confusing to me. Your videos don’t help with actual how to issues. Do you have an online manual? I travel a great deal for business and see great possibilities for what I THINK Evernote does. I’m feeling stupid and frustrated.
Andrew Sinkov
Marc, our manuals are available here: http://www.evernote.com/about/support/
lizzy
I am brand new to evernote, could someone help me understand the uses, I bought on impulse!
also, help me understand why having an evernote email account with the new note feature is more useful than just emailing yourself through your ‘normal’ email account? I want to learn!! thanks all
ciroattardo
Good point. That’s exactly what I was wondering. I have used EN for brief voice recordings and short reminders on my blackberry and found it helpful. I searched the forum but could not find why evernote’s email feature would be more useful than my gmail or google docs. Perhaps too simple a question? Or maybe I’m missing something too obvious?
Cheryll
My email contains all kinds of stuff – simple correspondences such as “how the heck are you doing?”, newsletters and product info, and SOMETIMES things about meetings, special documents, things I may have to pull up again. Even with using Gmail and it’s powerful search and tag features, there’s no searching within the PDFs or images.
Evernote, on the other hand, ONLY has stuff I need to pull up again at a later time. And it can search within the file or image. Lately, I’ve been writing notes on my iPad in my own handwriting and sending an email to Evernote then deleting the notes off my iPad because Evernote manages my notes much better than any annotation app could. Plus it searches handwriting
James
Just keeps getting better!
antiguajoe
This is a marvellous program and so glad that I upgraded to the premium version although the other version I could not ever get near to the capacity of it.
Pino Gonzati
Great job, guys!
David Lesak
Hi there, this is a great tool, but I have a request: the addition of tabs to the interface. I feel this would be especially useful to those of us who like me only have a small laptop screen to access the program. This inevitable means that not everything can appear on the screen. So tabs would be a good option to help get around this problem and enable easier note selection and swapping information between notes.
Thank you,
Kind regards,
David
Jaames
Can individual notes be moved from between notebooks ?
Andrew Sinkov
You can move your notes between notebooks from within the desktop of web versions of Evernote
ideathinker
Liking the evernote more and more, been using it of and on for a year or so, as a firefox plugin, now using the windows client all the time. The easy email integration pushes evernote further into my category of daily must have apps.
Next up Calendar to-do integration (like a plugin for thunderbird/firebird or at least caldav/ics…. What about remember the milk;just thinking out loud.)?
and maybe something with flowdock would be nice.
carlijn
Great, but what if you have more notebooks with the same name? I do have so…
Elle
Will you marry me?
Oh man I love Evernote, even more so with this fantabulous email feature and you say you are working on the tagging experience? I am giddy with anticipation.
I have been reading and experimenting for days and will soon indulge in Premium and I am nearly convinced that this will work for my application!!!
Slightly off topic some I’ve been looking for an asnwer in your manual and Q&A but don’t see it — Here’s my question.
Can Evenote have an archive feature that can be switched on or off according to the notebook? Say, notes would automatically be archived (or deleted) after a set time periord i.e., 30 days
You’re the best.
Elle
Yeong Wan Loy
what do i do if i want to use more than one tag?
Andrew Sinkov
You can use as many tags as you like. Your subject can be: [title] #[tag1] #[tag2] #[tag3]
BabsBabsBabs
EN is ESSENTIAL! Growing, Getting better daily. Make it more visual
…a notebook with tabs so u go to what you need instantly with help
at that tab… Trying to GTD and get rid of so much paper. Feels
funny/good to have ALL whereever I am! People think I’m SOOOO
organized! And Happily, I am! EVERnotedly…..Babs
Susan F
Seems like a great feature! I’m trying to figure out, though, exactly what can be e-mailed in this way. I tried sending some photos that were attached to an e-mail, but I don’t see them in any of my notebooks. Are attached files not included? Or is there a size limitation for e-mailed messages?
Andrew Sinkov
Susan, You can email attachments into Evernote. They must be smaller than the maximum note size, which is 25MB for free accounts and 50MB for premium accounts. It seems unlikely that we would have trouble with the image on our end, so I think it may be a limitation of your mail provider. Just to clarify, was a note created in Evernote without a photo, or was no note created at all?
Shane Crotty
Excellent feature. It is missing one attribute: It would be best to be able to enter a partial notebook name, for instances when long notebook names are used. For example:
Subject: note to email @My Favorite Stuff From Work
instead:
Subject: note to email @My Fav*
Asma
Love this feature! Already used it so many times. One question though, would itbe possible to have all my contacts within Evernote or could I link my Evernote with my Gmail contacts? Recently I am emailing a lot of notes to my friends.
Another question, the new look of the desktop client is awesome. could we have the same for Web????
Keep up the good work!
Greetings from Germany!
Andrew Sinkov
Thanks for the contacts suggestion!
Nathan L
Thank you! This is going to be a great help!
Might you consider using the dynamic “+” notation in email names too?
For example Gmail redirects mail to username+anything@gmail.com to username@gmail.com. I ask for entirely selfish reasons, since I have incoming mail to dynamic email addresses and I would love to just forward them directly to EN and have the email go to the right notebook.
alberto
When I email a note to my evernote account, I would like to see a Date and time stamp, but it is not there… Can you see that this is included? It would be very useful. Thank you
Andrew Sinkov
All notes in Evernote have both Created and Updated date fields. You may need to view note info in order to see it.
dudo
It’s great, but the email address is too long to write and remember it.
Andrew Sinkov
We suggest adding it to your address book. That way, you won’t need to remember it.
Marcelo Kuramoto
I would like to have the possibility to add also the ¨create date¨. Sometimes, when I have time, I start to update my Evenote and most ot the sime, with notes that happend sometime ago.
Andrew Sinkov
You can edit the Created Date and Update Date within the note. Open the note in Evernote for Mac or Evernote for Windows and view the note details.
Thomas
I wish I had read the Evernote Update email earlier. This is beautiful. I have used the email to Evernote function but being able to automatically file and tag emails makes Evernote far more useful.