Is it safe to email notes into Obsidian? Privacy, retention and security

The short version

Think of us as a short stopover, not a storage service. We hold your email for hours. Your vault keeps it for good.

• Email content is kept for 72 hours at most, then deleted.
• It's held on servers at Hetzner in Germany.
• Only authorized senders can add notes to your vault.
• Your notes are plain Markdown files in your own vault.
• You have GDPR and CCPA rights, including deletion on request.

Where your email goes, step by step

1. 1

   Step 1: You send it

   You forward or send an email to your private ingest address.
2. 2

   Step 2: It's checked

   We accept it only if it was sent to your address from one of your authorized senders. Anything else is ignored.
3. 3

   Step 3: It waits briefly

   The content (subject, body and attachments) is held on our servers at Hetzner in Germany.
4. 4

   Step 4: The plugin fetches it

   The Send Email into Vault community plugin, authenticated with your API key, fetches the email.
5. 5

   Step 5: It becomes a note, and our copy is deleted

   It's written as a Markdown note in your local vault. We hold email content for at most 72 hours, then delete it.

That's the whole path. We aren't an archive: email content is deleted within 72 hours, and the note you keep lives in your vault.

Who can send to your vault

Your ingest address only accepts mail from your authorized senders. Your account email is authorized automatically, and you can add up to 3 more addresses. Each one has to be confirmed through an email we send to it, so nobody can add an address they don't control.

Mail from anyone else is ignored. Still, treat your ingest address like a password: don't post it publicly or put it in an email signature.

This check is also why automatic Gmail forwarding isn't accepted. When Gmail forwards automatically, the From address stays as the original sender, not you, so it fails the check. Manual forwarding works because the forward comes from you.

Who processes your data

We use a short list of sub-processors. Some are US companies, and we'd rather you hear that from us:

The full details are in our privacy policy.

API keys and access to your account

The plugin connects to your account with an API key you create in the dashboard. You can have up to 5 keys at once, and each one expires after 3, 5 or 12 months, whichever you choose.

A few sensible habits:

• Use one key per device, so you know which key lives where.
• Pick the shortest expiry you're comfortable renewing.
• Let keys for devices you no longer use expire rather than reusing them elsewhere.

What we receive

For each email you send us, we receive what any email contains: the sender and recipient addresses, the subject, the body and any attachments. We need those to check the sender and build your note. We don't receive anything from the rest of your mailbox, because we're never connected to it.

No mailbox access

We never connect to your inbox. There's no IMAP password to hand over and no OAuth permission to grant. We only ever see the emails you choose to send us.

That's the main difference from IMAP plugins, which log into your mailbox with your credentials and can read everything in it. Both approaches have their place, and we compare them fairly in forwarding address vs IMAP plugin.

Your rights

We support GDPR rights for people in the EU and EEA, and CCPA rights for California residents. That includes asking us to delete your data. Email [email protected] and we'll take care of it. Our privacy policy has the details.

What we don't claim

Being clear about the limits matters as much as the features:

• We don't claim end-to-end encryption or zero-knowledge. To turn an email into a note, it has to be readable on our servers. Then it's deleted within 72 hours.
• Forwarding from Proton or Tuta sends a readable copy. Those services encrypt your mailbox, but once you forward a message to us, we receive a normal, readable email.
• We don't offer AI summaries. Your email is converted into a note as it is.

Should you send work or research email?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Run through this checklist first:

• Check your employer's or client's policy on forwarding email, and any NDAs you've signed.
• If you work with research participants, follow your ethics board or IRB rules for participant data.
• Don't send passwords, or identifiable data you aren't permitted to share.
• If you automate, keep rules narrow so only the emails you mean to keep get forwarded.

As a rough guide, things like travel confirmations, receipts, your own notes and published newsletters are usually low risk. Think twice about client contracts under NDA, HR matters, medical details, or anything with another person's identifiable data in it. When in doubt, leave it in your inbox.

Some Microsoft 365 organizations block automatic forwarding to outside addresses for exactly these reasons. See work Outlook and forwarding policies for how that plays out, and email capture for research for research workflows.

How this compares

At the time of writing (November 2026), other approaches handle your data in different ways:

• Email to Vault routes mail through third-party mail.tm servers, and its own listing warns against sending sensitive data.
• IMAP plugins need your mailbox credentials. One of them, Email Importer (IMAP), says in its docs that the password is stored unencrypted in the plugin's data.json file.
• Zapier-style automations add more cloud services to the path, plus a synced vault folder they can write to.

And sometimes the right answer is none of the above. If you can't send any email to a third party, a self-hosted script or plain copy-paste is the right call. For a closer look at other tools, see how other email plugins handle your data.

If we shut down

Your notes are already Markdown files in your vault. There's nothing to export and nothing locked in a format only we can read. We can't promise more than that, but it's a good position to be in.