Email to myself - email to Markdown converter

For some time, I've been working on a solution to the "email to myself" problem. It's just so much easier when using various apps & services to email things to yourself for processing later than capturing them into some kind of task management system, especially on iOS where copy & paste and switching between apps provides consideraby more friction than the ubiquitous "share by email" feature, but your inbox is not a good todo list for several different reasons.

It seems like I'm not alone. Agile Tortoise, makers of the awesome Markdown scratchpad Drafts, recently blogged about it too, saying that many of their users have requested an "email to myself" feature. They proposed setting up a Twitter account, and using it in conjunction with a service called IFTTT. I'd like to offer another solution which works well with pretty much anything that can send emails, including Drafts.

Email to Markdown

WikiPack pages exist as plaintext Markdown files in a Dropbox folder, and when you log into your wiki, they are rendered as formatted HTML and linked together using WikiWords. As of now, each page in your wiki also has its own email address that you can send content to, using its WikiWord and your wiki's subdomain to form the address. For example:

    Inbox@yoursubdomain.wikipackit.com

HTML email conversion

Most apps that can send stuff via email, like Safari, Reeder, and Flipboard use some simple HTML to apply some formatting and insert link text. The HTML will be converted back to Markdown automatically before it is added to the page. It supports basic HTML tags, not tables.

Plaintext emails

Some apps just use plaintext emails, which is fine, because Markdown is plaintext, so no conversion is required.

Using it with Drafts and other apps

Adding content to your pages is now as simple as sending an email. Here's how to do it in a few different apps:

Email to Markdown with Drafts

Drafts is the perfect comanion to WikiPack for quickly capturing ideas, and then adding them to a wiki page in just a few taps because it can preview the Markdown for you before emailing it.

It has many sharing options (which you can configure now), including Email and Markdown: Email. The Markdown: Email action will actually convert it to HTML, but we just want to add the raw Markdown to our wiki, so use the Email action instead.

• Compose and preview your Markdown in Drafts
• Hit the share button, and select the Email action
• Enter the email address of the page you want to send it to and hit send
  • Once you've entered it, iOS will remember and autocomplete it next time

Email to Markown with Safari

The most common cause of "email to myself" behaviour in Safari is to store a link to the current page for acting on later, or bookmarking it. Make a Links wiki page, then just email the webpage to it!

Mobile Safari

• Open a page
• Tap the share icon next to the address bar
• Select Mail link to this page
• Enter the destination page's email address and hit send

Desktop Safari

• Open a page
• Hit SHIFT+COMMAND+I
  • This will open your default email client, like Sparrow for example
• Enter the destination page's email address and hit send

Email to Markdown with Reeder

• Tap the sharing icon in the top right while viewing an article
• Select Mail link
• Enter the destination page's email address and hit send

You can try the Mail article action, and it does a reasonable job actually, but will need to update it a bit to strip out the <style> tags.

Email to Markdown with Flipboard

• Flip to a Tweet or RSS article
• Tap the share icon in the bottom right
• Select Email link
• Enter the destination page's email address and hit send

A world of possibilities

It's early days for this feature, and with your input I'm sure it will evolve a lot, but there are so many possibilities for what you can do with it already. Effectively, I've just given you an API of sorts for converting emails to Markdown that is synced automatically to Dropbox. That's pretty cool!

Just for fun:

• Open one of your pages in Marked
• Type up some quick Markdown in Drafts and email it to the page
• Watch in awe as the rendered page updates automatically in Marked

Let me know what awesome ways you come up with for using WikiPack's new email to Markdown feature!

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