Send emails into Obsidian via Postmark

This is a submission for the Postmark Challenge: Inbox Innovators.

What I Built

My cofounder and I run screen.garden, a SaaS service that brings realtime collaboration and web editing to Obsidian. When we saw the Postmark challenge we realized what an opportunity Inbound email support is: we could combine it with our platform to allow emailing straight into screen.garden, and thus straight into your Obsidian vault.

We added a feature we're calling email automations. Email automations support custom aliases scoped to just your screen.garden team for privacy; alternatively, you can make an alias public to allow for more flexible integrations, like getting newsletters delivered straight to Obsidian.

Demo

We can't safely share credentials here, but there are instructions on how to set this up in our linked blog post above, and a demo video follows:

Code Repository

screen.garden is closed-source—we’d be happy to give a tour of the code as-needed.

How I Built It

screen.garden is built on an Elixir stack, using Phoenix, LiveView, and Oban, among others. We host on AWS. Here’s how we built this feature:

1. We added database models for inbound email addresses, including some metadata for if any email address should be able to create a note.
2. We added routing and a controller to act as a webhook recipient. The webhook checks the database for a matching recipient address and uses it to figure out auth (is the sender good to create a note?) and where the note should go.
3. If everything looks good, we grab the text body from the webhook payload (thanks Postmark!) and run that through our bespoke note creation backend.

It's really a testament to the inbound email feature's design simplicity that we were able to do this so quickly and easily. Having this feature opens up a ton of workflow options with Obsidian, like subscribing to newsletters directly in Obsidian or automating remote voice notes with WhisperMemos.