Turn meeting follow-ups and client emails into project notes

The short answer

Your project note should know what was decided, including the decisions that happened over email. Forward the recap, tag it with the client or project, and link it from the project note. Before the next call, everything you agreed on is one click away instead of buried in a thread.

The problem with decisions in email

Meetings end with a recap email. Clients reply with "one small change." Someone attaches the revised deck to a thread you weren't watching. Each message makes sense on its own, and together they hold the real history of the project.

Then it's ten minutes before the follow-up call and someone asks, "What did we agree on pricing?" You're searching two inboxes, scrolling a thread with 23 replies, and hoping the attachment you need is the latest version. Your carefully kept project note in Obsidian has the plan, but not the decisions that changed it.

The fix is small: get the emails that matter into the vault, next to the note they belong to.

The workflow

1. Forward the recap with tags

Forward the email to your ingest address and rewrite the subject so it reads well as a title, with tags at the end. On Pro, add the vault marker too:

The tags are removed from the title and added to the note. @@Work sends the note to your Work vault and is removed from the title as well. Your mail app adds "Fwd:" when you forward, and that prefix stays in the title unless you delete it, so trim it while you're editing the subject.

2. Link it from the project note

Open your Acme project note and add [[Acme kickoff recap]] under a "Decisions" heading. If you use Bases or Dataview, you can skip the manual step and show every note tagged #acme in a table on the project page. Either way, that part is your own Obsidian setup. Email2Obsidian creates the note, and you decide where it's linked.

3. Capture your own action items

Not every follow-up arrives as someone else's email. When you leave a meeting owing something, email yourself: Send Acme revised quote #todo #acme. It lands as a tagged note you can find with the rest of the project. There's more on that habit in capture to-dos by email.

4. Send from your phone between meetings

Walking between rooms? On iPhone, share a note or document to Mail and send it to your ingest address, or use an iOS Shortcut with the "Send Email" action from your own account. Both work because the email comes from you. On any phone, a plain Forward does the job.

Work and personal vaults

Plenty of people keep work and life in separate vaults. On Pro, the subject line picks the vault: @@Work for one, or @@"Second Brain" with quotes for a name that has spaces. You can combine it with tags in the same subject.

Starter is a single vault, which is fine if everything goes to one place. If you want client recaps in Work and recipes in Personal, Pro is the plan that does that. Full syntax is in route notes to a vault with @@.

Work email: what to check first

Client email is someone else's information too, so do three quick checks before you start.

Your employer's policy. Some companies don't allow client email to be forwarded to outside services. Ask, or check your handbook. If you do forward, here's where it goes: content is kept for up to 72 hours on servers in Germany, only until your plugin fetches it, then deleted. Our sub-processors are listed in the privacy policy, and privacy for client email explains it in plain terms.

Microsoft 365 forwarding rules. Many Microsoft 365 tenants block automatic forwarding to external addresses. A manual forward may still work if your policy allows external email. Where rules are allowed, a "Forward to" rule sends the email as you and works, while "Redirect to" keeps the original sender and doesn't. See Outlook rules and Microsoft 365 limits.

Your work address as a sender. Your account email is authorized automatically. Add your work address as one of up to 3 extra senders and confirm it by email, so forwards from it are accepted.

Which plan fits

A consultant forwarding about five emails a workday sends around 100 a month. Starter covers that with room to spare: 300 emails a month for $2.49. If you want separate work and personal vaults, Pro is $4.49 a month for 1,000 emails and multiple vaults. The Free plan gives you 10 lifetime emails to try the workflow on a real project first.

Need work and personal vaults? See Pro on the pricing page.