Store notes in your Google Mail account

Sometimes you need to jot something down, such as a name, an address, a book you have heard about that you want to read, a website URL, or something else. Where do you store your notes? There are note taking apps, sticky notes, text editors and so on, but one option you may not have thought of is to use Google Mail.

In the left panel in Google Mail I have Notes. I don't know how it got there and perhaps I created it years ago or it could have been some software I was using. Looking at the list of system labels in Google Mail settings, it is not there, so I'm not sure how I came to have a Notes label. It doesn't matter because it is easy to create a note taking facility in Google Mail.

To create and store a note you just have to create a new email and enter your own address as the recipient. Just email it to yourself. It may sound like an odd thing to do, but it does work and the message goes to the email server and comes straight back to your inbox. All you need to do is to select the email using the tickbox on the left and then click the Labels button at the top. The first time you do this you will need to create a Notes label. Then you can simply assign the Notes label to emails you want to save.

Sending emails to yourself is a handy way to store information you want to remember. Don't forget that an email can contain images, hyperlinks and attached files, so your notes can be used to store almost any information. It's useful for storing things for work projects, items found when browsing the web and similar things.

It is a bit of a pain having to select emails sent to yourself and label them as notes, so why not configure Google Mail to do this automatically? Go to the gear icon, Settings, Filters. Create a new filter and in the From box enter your own email address. Click Create a filter with this search. Select Apply the label and choose Notes, and also Skip the inbox. This makes it only appear when the Notes label is selected on the left and not in your inbox.

Now when you send an email to yourself it will automatically be added to Notes.

Bug fix update: It didn't take long to realise that there was a flaw in this. Google Mail doesn't just apply filters to incoming messages, it applies them to all messages. Messages you send are not placed in the sent Mail folder, they are simply tagged with the Sent Mail label. When you select Sent Mail you see just those emails with the Sent Mail label. Of course, all mail I send is from me, so the filter turned every email I sent into a note! The solution is simple. Just edit the filter (or when you are creating it), apply the Notes label to emails with your email address in both the To and From boxes. That way only emails you send to yourself become notes.