blog / Send emails to your Obsidian vault with screen.garden

We are very, very excited to introduce the ability to send emails to screen.garden and have them appear in your collections (and thus your Obsidian vault!) as notes:

This feature is, for now, included in the base plan for $4/mo. We’ll get into how it all works in a minute, but first…

This is the first of what we’re calling experimental features: parts of screen.garden that are new, in flux, and—most important—that we especially want your feedback on. To that end: if you’re excited about this feature, use this feature, and/or want more out of it, please join our Discord and/or email us at [email protected] so that we can gauge how exactly to continue maturing this feature.

Okay, with that out of the way let’s explain how to set this up in your own account and how to use it.

Setting up email automations

To get started, make sure you have a collection set up in your screen.garden team. Remember, collections are, well, collections of notes, and they can be connected to an Obsidian folder or an entire vault. Select your collection on the web, then edit it by clicking the pencil:

Then, on the collection settings page, click the New Email Automation button under the Email Automations section:

Then fill out the form that appears. In this example, I’m creating an automation that puts the contents of emails in a folder called inbox/newsletters in my collection.

It’s marked as Publicly available, which means that any sender can send an email into screen.garden to create a note via this automation. If that box was not checked only members of my team with access to this collection could use it.

After I press Save the automation will be created and its associated email address will be listed. I can reopen it to edit it, disable it (blocking all future emails), and quickly copy its email address:

I can now click Copy and email that address to create notes via email! Notes will be titled by subject and will have the email body as their content. HTML emails—like many newsletters—will be converted to text for you.

An Experiment

As we noted up top, we’re calling this an experiment. This is the sort of feature that could go in many different directions and we want to make sure we shape it so that it solves real problems.

You also might have noticed that it’s in the base plan for now. It may very well stay there! But we haven’t yet decided what limits, if any, to apply here, and in the absence of those limits we’re going to let everyone use it at no extra cost within reason for the time being.

Enjoy your new email automations! And please reach out via email or Discord to let us know what you think.