Email into joplin

Features
1

I would like to discuss the feature ‘email into joplin’.

This feature adds a workflow to archive messages from your email into joplin.

Ideally, the user would forward a message to a catch-address. this is practically impossible without requiring the user to host a mail server.

The better option: The user can create a special configurable folder (i.e. /joplin) in his email account and move/copy messages intended for joplin in there. The desktop/terminal application, when syncing, could also login into this email account and pull all messages from this specific folder and import them, optionally parsing notebook and tags from the subject line (i.e. @notebook1 #tag1 #tag2).

This feature benefits from the existing HTML to MD logic.

2

I think the best is to save the mail into the cloud (supported) service in a dedicated folder that Joplin could then import.
Otherwise, it is a server configuration to get the mail and a script that could extract the mail and create a MD file to be then imported

1 Like
3

Although it might be a better solution, it would essentially mean creating an email client in Joplin, which is very complicated and out of scope.

The solution mentioned by @foxmask would be do-able since the drivers to access the various cloud platforms already exist.

1 Like
4

Thank you for your replies.

Foxmast his solution could work. However I personally feel it is to complicated from the end user’s perspective. Moving a message to a different folder, or forwarding a message, is much more simple compared to exporting from ones email client (whether it is desktop or cloud) and moving those files to a import folder for Joplin to pick them up.

I wonder, is the mail client solution out of scope because of the mentioned complexity or because the proposed feature does not fit well into the feature set of Joplin?

5

Mostly the complexity. Getting a client to be compatible with a multitude of different email servers is extremely complex. It would be like a separate project on its own, which is why it's kind of out of scope.

Evernote can do this because they are online first, so you send an email to their server that they manage (very easy to handle) and they can create a note from that (also very easy).

I agree it would be a useful feature but unfortunately, as of now, not technically possible.

6

I also like the idea to e-mail to joplin. So I would like to give some thoughts about that:

  1. Maybe addons for already existing clients like thunderbird/ outlook which would work similar to the joplin-clipper could be a solution. So I am able to archive my e-mails to joplin (but still cannot e-mail from another email adress to joplin)

  2. Is there a need for emailing to joplin if we would have full share to joplin support on all platforms? Than I could share from the e-mail client via the share function into joplin

7

to be able to to this, something completly outside of joplin could use:

  • a mail server, you own
  • procmail to retreive the mails and then trigger joplin import /path/to/new/markdown/files folder_name
8

Hi there,

isn’t it an idea to drag and drop Mails from the client (like thunderbird / outlook) to a note?

The handle is only client side.

Only an idea…
Best regards,
Adrian

9

Hi guys, this might be interesting for you:
Just finished my very first draft of an “email-to-joplin gateway”.
Please take a look at https://github.com/manolitto/joplin-mail-gateway
Regards
Manfred

4 Likes
10

That looks quite impressive, it even has thumbnails for pdf files.

Setup is a bit long but I think could be simplified with simple setup script that would have all the apt install, etc.

11

it's things like that, that make me loved FOSS :sunglasses:

12

Simple script to send from Outlook to Joplin: First trial to create note from Outlook