Gmail To Evernote Information Management Workflow
Capturing information has to be as low-key, as easy as it can be. Smooth, is the word I’m looking for, I think.
My favorite capture tool since 2005-ish has been Evernote. Highlight, CTRL + C, CTRL + ALT + V to create a new pasted note from anywhere within Windows.
But back then Evernote was a local installation application only. Bugged me as I switch between my desktop and a laptop provided by Canada’s SEO company.
Enter Gmail [hat tip: Turn Gmail Into Your Personal Nerve Center].
Gmail Capture Process
- Get the Google toolbar.
- Highlight info on a page, click Send To, choose Gmail.
- In the subject line I use a pipe followed by keywords/tags.
Those keywords allow you to do “tag” searches by doing a subject search in Gmail.
…to Evernote Workflow
To send information into my Gmail database I, of course, use a special + email address as in Gmail you can do youremail+anything@.
In Gmail I’ve setup a filter which will label any email to this specific address with DB, short for database (why not database in full? simple, in a search it is faster to restrict to label:db or l:db than using the word “database” spelled out in full….).
The address is also filtered to automatically forward to my special Evernote email address. Minutes after the note arrives in Gmail it’s available in Evernote too.
Once every 1-3 days I go into my “InBox” notebook in Evernote and go through the incoming notes. This is a fast, short job. Give it one “real” Evernote tag, usually. Very high level too. Then drag it into one of the handful of notebooks I keep (again very high level. Any complete web page capture goes into Web Archive, for example).
Done.
The Benefits
- Future proof: Evernote might disappear, email won’t
- Automatic backup
- Both available from anywhere with Gmail being just a tad better available even
- Keywords (“tags”) in the subject/title of the note allow for subject searches in Gmail and intitle searches in Evernote
- Searches in both Evernote and Gmail are fast while each has its own strengths
- Since a little while Evernote has removed the inline Goto Source to a tiny button, making note export with URL a royal pain. Gmail includes the source link.
The only time I clip directly into Evernote is when images/graphics are of importance to me: Gmail stores a link to the images, not the images themselves. And yes, in that case I often email the note to Gmail :)
September 20th, 2008 at 4:28 am
Good outline – thanks
Is there a way to mass forward to evernote the posts that I have already got in Gmail DB? The filter setup does not work on old posts – any way round this?
Thanks again
ray
September 20th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
Ray, two simple ways I can think of.
One is to use Outlook (or perhaps Thunderbird or Windows Live Mail etc.). Setup the forwarding rule and choose to “Run Rule Now”.
You can also setup Outlook with two accounts: Gmail IMAP and Evernote IMAP. Then you can just drag & drop your messages between the two accounts. Word of warning: if you have a lot of tags in EN the download can be long and buggy.
February 21st, 2009 at 3:37 am
I’ve written a small tool to capture selected content from applications (including browsers) and automatically create a new email from that content.
This helps me a lot with gathering notes and sending them to my gmail account.
Might be useful for others too, so here’s the link:
http://tools.tortoisesvn.net/MailNoter
(sourcecode is available too).
If you think this post is unwanted advertising, just ignore it.
February 21st, 2009 at 8:22 am
What a great idea, Stefan. I haven’t tried the tool (no real need for it myself) but really like your thinking. Very practical.
Great set of other tools there as well. grepWin is very useful for example.
Thanks for the comment and the heads-up on your tools!
February 27th, 2009 at 9:33 pm
Hi nice post, i read your blog from time to time but i was wondering something. I also run a blog on a similar topic, but i get 1,000’s of spam comments and emails every day does that happen to you.. Any ideas to stop it? I currently have commenting disabled but i want to turn it back on.. Thanks!
February 27th, 2009 at 9:49 pm
Hi Evangeline. Do you have Akismet enabled? It doesn’t stop everything and catches a few false positives every now and then but does help a lot.
April 14th, 2009 at 2:19 am
We use Gmail and Evernote at our company, but we never thought to use it that way. It seems very interresting. Thanks for the tip.
July 8th, 2009 at 5:44 pm
Interesting idea. I love this out of the box thinking.
Instead of using Gmail to capture your notes, what about using blogger? (Send to > Blogger). I’ve been wanting to try out Evernote, but it doesn’t work too well through our corporate proxy so I decided to try blogger. So far, it works, plus I can use my own custom domain to host my notes (i.e. notes.ruudhein.com)
PS – I came across your site after doing a search for “Evernote gmail”
October 17th, 2009 at 9:50 am
Great idea. Do you know of any way to email FROM evernote to gmail? I despise outlook, etc. but when I click on the “mail” button on evernote it wants to pull that. I use gmail for everything – I’m sure I’m overlooking something simple. Thanks – just found your blog and like it very much.
October 17th, 2009 at 2:12 pm
John, even when you would use utilities that cause mailto links etc to open in Gmail by default, Evernote cannot use it to send its notes. The “conversation” between Evernote and the email program goes via MAPI; MAPI is the way other programs can talk with your email program and ask it to do “stuff”. Browsers don’t come with MAPI because, well, they’re browsers, not email programs.
My solution has been to install an email client that supports rich formatting and launches fast enough for me to not mind. In my case that’s Windows Live Mail (the desktop program, not the web service); the compose window launches in no-time.
Set your reply-to and that’s it
December 6th, 2009 at 9:13 pm
Thanks for your last reply. I’ve been looking for the answer to this question for a year. I’m disappointed but satisfied. I still wish I could email Evernote from Gmail. Thanks.
December 7th, 2009 at 11:12 am
The 3.5 Evernote has a built-in email service. Ergo, the email is sent via them. Maybe worth to check out. It works very nice. On the other hand, 3.5 does lack a lot of functionality from 3.1. Seems to Evernote’s strategy: to remove a bit of stuff on every release :)