Get course emails into Obsidian, tagged by class

The short answer

Course logistics belong next to your course notes. If you already take lecture notes in Obsidian, the briefs, deadlines and reading lists for each class should live there too. Forward them with a course tag, and they do.

Before: the semester inbox

Week three, and your inbox is a mix of Canvas notifications, a professor's "small change to the essay prompt," a reading list for next Tuesday, and a group chat that moved to email for some reason. The brief you need is in there somewhere. So is the deadline. Finding both takes longer than it should, and it happens every week.

After: one tag per course

Now each of those emails is a note, tagged by course, with the attachment included. Here's an assignment brief after you forward it:

Open the #hist101 tag and you see every brief, announcement and reading list for that class in one place, right beside your own notes.

How to set it up

Create your account and install the plugin

Sign up (no credit card), then in Obsidian install the Send Email into Vault community plugin and paste the API key from your dashboard. It takes about two minutes.

Add your school address as a sender

Your account email is authorized automatically. If course email goes to a school address, add it as one of up to 3 extra senders and confirm it by email. Check that your school allows forwarding to outside addresses first, since policies vary from school to school.

Pick a tag scheme

Course code plus type works well: #hist101 #reading, #cs201 #deadline, #bio110 #announcement. Keep each tag one word, because a tag runs until the next #. Don't put a # in the title itself either. The full rules are in tag notes from the subject line.

Forward from your phone

Most course email gets read on a phone, so that's where you'll forward it. Tap Forward in your mail app, or on iPhone use the share sheet to send a file through Mail. Delete the "Fwd:" prefix while you add tags, since it isn't removed for you. More tips in send to Obsidian from your phone.

What to send

Not every email deserves a note. These usually do:

• Course announcements that change dates, rooms or requirements
• Assignment briefs, with the PDF attached
• Reading lists for the week
• Group-project decisions (who's doing what, and by when)
• Feedback on graded work, so you can apply it to the next assignment
• Your own reminders, written as a new email: Book library room #cs201 #todo

Canvas, Moodle and other notifications

Learning platforms send notification emails from their own address, not yours. That matters, because Email2Obsidian only accepts email from your authorized addresses. So you can't subscribe your ingest address to course notifications, and Gmail's automatic forwarding isn't supported either (Gmail keeps the platform as the sender).

What works is a manual forward of the notifications that matter. Honestly, that's the better system anyway: you don't need 40 "new discussion reply" emails in your vault, just the announcement that moved the exam.

What it costs for a semester

Price matters on a student budget, so here are the real numbers. The Free plan gives you 10 emails with no credit card. They're lifetime, not monthly, so they're enough to try the workflow with your first few briefs, not to run a whole semester.

If you keep going, Starter is $2.49 a month for 300 emails, which is far more than most course loads produce. There's no student discount. You can cancel anytime and keep access until the end of the period you paid for, so you only pay for the months you're in class. To estimate your own volume, see how many emails you'll need.

After you graduate

Your school mailbox may not last, but your notes will. Everything you forwarded is a plain Markdown file in your own vault. When your school address goes away, update your authorized senders and carry on. If you head into a graduate program, our page on email capture for researchers and PhD students picks up where this one leaves off.