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I want a webapp that will allow me to quickly save notes via email.

The main feature that I would like would be to be able to append via email. So, suppose I have a list of movies I want to see. I might send an email:

@movies The King's speech

I might then send another email

@movies Lord of the Rings

Spiderman

I should then be able to visit the note "Movies" and see something like

The King's speech

Lord of the Rings

Spiderman

Evernote allows you to create new notes using email and tag them, but it doesn't allow you to append - instead creating a new note each time. This gets very messy for these kinds of lists

Vital Features

  • Search
  • Basic formatting (bold, bulletpoints, hyperlinks)

Bonus features

  • Tags
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3
  • Maybe look into IFTTT? You can have a notebook called "Movies" with movies in multiple notes.
    – KGo
    Mar 16, 2014 at 15:32
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    @KaranGoel: Thanks Karen, but that ends up being rather messy in my opinion
    – Casebash
    Mar 17, 2014 at 6:24
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    Ok. It's Karan. :) If there's nothing already, I can make something simple by the end of month.
    – KGo
    Mar 17, 2014 at 18:05

3 Answers 3

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5

I use (and love) Remember the Milk for a similar workflow (along with many others). The free account tier should cover your use case; the $25/year Pro version basically adds push sync to their mobile app(s). The main difference is that rather that notes and appending text to them, I use lists and/or tags and add items to the list.

Each account (I am alerque) is issued a special email address to receive incoming tasks. See RTM's help page for details. For example I can send an email like this:

To: alerque+<redacted>@rmilk.com
Subject: The King's speech #movies

This will add a task tagged movies (or to a list named movies if I have on.

But there's more. Besides adding an item, you can also give it more details including a full length description in the body of the email. Ar say the movie hasn't come out yet?

To: alerque+<redacted>@rmilk.com
Subject: The Hobbit, The Battle of The Five Armies #movies ^Dec 17

Now this won't show up in my movies list until it comes out.

If you don't like this abbreviated syntax, you can use more natural language (e.g. "on date" instead of "^date". See SmartAdd for details. You can also use a more verbose template format in the email body. Additional meta data can be provided as either known fields like URL, location, reminders, etc. or in a free form text field.

Besides email, you can use Twitter DM, mobile apps and various extensions to add tasks using the same syntax.

The results are not only searchable, but smart-lists allow you to organize lists based on pre-defined search criteria.

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    That's actually pretty cool for these kinds of simple lists. It's slightly annoying how Remember the Milk de-emphasised the note details though
    – Casebash
    May 24, 2014 at 1:25
3

It sounds like wunderlist might be a better fit - it lets you send an email to a special email address using the subject name as the name of the task, and the body as the a note. You can access the task from either the wunderlist inbox, or through an app for your phone

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    Welcome to Software Recommendations! This post does not contain enough information to be considered a high quality answer. Please read our discussion on what makes an answer high quality to see if you can incorporate some of these improvements into your answer, otherwise it will be removed. Specifically at a quick look, make sure to include a link. Also does it match the requirements - all of them? any caveats?
    – Nick Dickinson-Wilde
    May 23, 2014 at 5:32
  • I've edited your question to better show a possible workflow - its by no way complete, but it should be a start in improving your answer. You might want to add screenshots, and/or talk about how these tools would solve the specific user story of the OP.
    – Journeyman Geek
    May 23, 2014 at 8:34
2

Its a bit of a hack but you could do something similar to this with gmail - you could either use + tags or @notation with a label set up

gmail create filter screen 1

gmail filter screen 2

I'd tweak this a little more - maybe filter it to emails sent by you, then you can filter them out by label, and use IFTT to trigger off things.

For extra credit you could use this with IFTT 's gmails labels trigger with maybe google drive (append to document looks about right) or pushbullet(which exposes each item essentially as part of a list)

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