Synopsis
This post discusses how to create Evernote notes using your emails as the note’s content. More importantly, I discuss how you might benefit by using this feature. 2 major reasons include: It’s a great way to backup your important emails. Your Searches become super-charged because you’re now taking full advantage of Evernote’s renowned Search utility. Finding important emails becomes fast & easy…even if you’re offline! Read on for additional ideas.
Introduction
Many friends have asked me what I use Evernote for. My answer is that Evernote is an extension of my brain. It helps me to process large amounts of data in ways that I never thought were possible. They usually don’t find that answer very helpful, so I thought I would write posts about the different ways that I use Evernote and the methods I use for each.
How I Use Evernote To Backup Important Emails
One frequent way that I use Evernote is to forward important Emails that I’ll need to access again. This is essentially a backup of the original email. I always move emails I intend to save into an email folder with a corresponding name…say Travel, for example. Since I use ios mobile devices almost exclusively and since I have around 6 email accounts that I need to regularly monitor (for my website’s, YouTube Channel and things) finding emails can and does present some challenges.
These problems may be inherent to Apple devices, or to Apple mobile devices, or maybe just to mobile devices in general. I’m not entirely sure. I do know that they don’t arise very often when using Windows desktop or laptop devices. It’s also possible that they can arise more frequently because most of my email accounts use my own domains. I use domains that I ‘rent’ along with a domain email server that I pay for annually.
That sounds way more complicated than it actually is. It’s really a simple easy system that gives me complete control over my own email accounts for a very small annual fee (by small I mean less than $35 annually.) I really love the control I have and how simple the whole process is, and ultimately I’ve never been more happy with an email setup than the one I have now. I’ll include a little more information about that at the end of this post. But if anyone’s interested in my writing a more detailed guide to how to go about setting up your own email accounts using a rented server, let me know and I’ll write a post on just that.
So oftentimes I encounter problems finding emails that I know I’ve saved in folders on my iPads, especially…that’s my primary reason for frequently forwarding important emails to Evernote. Evernote’s search utility is much, much better than any I’ve ever run across. Since finding emails has always been such a frustrating task…using the power inherent in Evernote for that purpose is a powerful marraige of utilities.
Here are some of my other key reasons:
- I want to save the information contained in an email in a specific subject folder (really called a notebook in EV.)
- The email is a Reciept and I keep one notebook where I store all of my digital receipts…slowly I’m switching everything to digital with my Fujitsu scanner, but I’m not quite there yet.
- The email contains a ticket such as a recently purchased airline ticket
- The email contains a reservation # such as for a car rental
- The email contains notes I need for upcoming events…like the date, time and location of our next book club meeting and the book we’re reading
- The email contains articles or links to current projects we’re working on…like right now we’re remodeling our kitchen, and our landscaper will be planting some replacement trees for many we’ve had to take down due to disease.
How to Forward Email to Evernote
Step One | Find out What Your Evernote Email Address Is
- Discover your Evernote email address on ios devices (iPhone & iPad)
On ios open Evernote Settings by tapping the Gear icon in the upper left hand corner.
Go to General – and scroll down to Evernote Email address
Tap on the right pointing carot and a menu opens that displays your EV email address. From here you can tap on the ‘Copy To Clipboard‘ or ‘Reveal in Contacts‘ options to save this email address to your contacts.
On ios devices I save this email address on my own Contact Card and I change the label for it to a custom one which says ‘Forward to EV’
- Discover your email address on Android devices
Go to Settings on Evernote Android by tapping on the three small dots in the upper right hand corner.
Tap on Account info, the first entry in the left hand menu. Look in about the middle of the right hand column for Evernote email. If you tap on it you’re taken to another screen that lets you save the email address in your contacts.
- Discover your email address on Apple computers
Go to Help – Account Settings
- Discover your email address on Windows computers
Go to Tools – Account info
- Discover your email address on the Web Version of Evernote
Click on your profile picture – then select settings – look for the Email Notes section
Step 2 | Test Out Sending an Email
Test this out once you’ve saved your EV email address in Contacts, by going to any email and forwarding it by just adding this EV email address into the To: field.
To save even more time, if you’re forwarding the email to others then you can just include your EV email address as one of those you’re forwarding to as well.
Security Suggestion:
The only time I don’t feel comfortable using the above forwarding option is if I’m replying to or forwarding to someone I don’t really know. While I doubt that this is a huge security concern, I always exercise the same caution I would in any other situation that applies to who you share your email address with…after all, you don’t want your notebooks filled up by Spammers!
Step 3 | Open Evernote and Locate the New Note
As I’m sure you’re aware, everyone selects a default notebook in Evernote that acts as the main recipient notebook for any notes that originated from ‘outside’ sources or automatic sources. In my case I’ve designated my ‘Reciepts’ notebook as the default. Sometimes immediately following the forwarding process, but more often about once a week, I visit my Receipts Notebook to sort and move any emails that have appeared there into their proper notebooks.
Alternate Step 3 | Time Saving Tip
- Using the @ symbol to designate a forwarding notebook
- Using the # symbol to add any tags you’ve previously setup in EV
To save even more time you can designate which notebook the email should appear in by simply adding the @ symbol immediately followed by the notebook name as the very last item on the Subject line of the email (but before any tags you may add to with the # symbol.)
This may be followed by adding any tags (tags you’ve already created) preceding them with the # symbol
Recent Example of Mine:
Forwarding an Airline Reciept
I don’t like to save airline Reciepts in my Reciept Notebook (which is my usual default notebook)…but that’s where they will end up if I do nothing more. Which illustrates yet another of my handy Quick Tips:
I like to place airline tickets into specific travel destination notebooks. So the subject line of a newly purchased airline ticket might look something like this:
American Air Flights to San Francisco | Oct 2016 | #SF10/16 #San Francisco | @🇺🇸California•Colorado
The subject line above will place my new airline ticket receipt into my 🇺🇸California•Colorado Notebook and attach 2 tags to it…San Francisco and SF10/16. Because I have a lot of notebooks I use emojis like the US flag one shown to help me visually ID specific notebooks quickly. I also use the same emoji for organizational purposes, since those notebooks with the same emoji will be grouped together in EV’s alphabetic organization scheme.
One Extra Time Saving Tip Using ios – How to Remember the Names of Notebooks
Using ios’es Text Replacement utility in Keyboard Settings to Save Time
Go to Settings – General – Keyboard – Text Replacement
It can be difficult to remember the exact name of notebooks in EV. Sometimes when I’m doing this on the fly I’ll just put the @ with as much of the notebooks name as I remember…sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Evernote keeps getting smarter and smarter, so the likelihood that only a partial title will work is improving.
So, when I know I’ll be forwarding lots of things…say for an upcoming trip, I’ll go into ios Settings to create a Shortcut and enter a longer phrase that will be added when I just input a few characters. Here’s an example for our upcoming trip:
‘EVCACO’ is what I type on the ios keyboard
So EVCACO is what I type and what I entered in the ‘text replacement‘ settings to automatically add this notebook name: 🇺🇸California•Colorado for me
It’s really pretty brilliant and so easy to use!
Below are some examples of how this appears in Evernote for ios
This first example below shows several notes I emailed to Evernote using the example I described here.
The next screenshot shows how Evernote usually appears on ios. The left column displays Note and Notebooks and the right column my most recent saved notes in a specific notebook.
The last screenshot below shows more detail in the left hand column of my most recently saved notes. These will always display with the most recent note appearing at the top of the list.
Enter a caption
Link to Evernote’s 2012 Quick Tip About forwarding emails
Hover is the Domain Provider I Use for my Email Accounts
I use Hover to buy (really rent) domains and for their email services. That way I can have my own email address names like me@vsatips on my vsatips.com domain.
I’d rather create my own than use one of the set standards that most people use in 2016 like Gmail, iCloud mail, Yahoo, Outlook, Hotmail or AOL for a number of reasons. But the main one is control. I can maintain complete control over my email account and I’m not subject to the whimsy of email providers like Google, Yahoo and Outlook who seem to completely overhaul how they do things every few years, requiring users to learn a whole new email system and change the way they do things. Which raises a question. Are any of my readers interested in learning how to do this? It’s not very hard and I really love using email once again since I can now dictate exactly how I want my emails to look and work. If you are interested, leave a comment at the bottom.
vsatips 