succulentoats

For many years, I used an OBTF to keep my notes.
That system is amazing! It's a major issue that it's not easy to search, reference or edit my notes on mobile. Mobile capture, search and reference of my notes is super important for me.

Why use email to keep notes?

Integrated metadata
There are very ¹⁾mature apps for all platforms including mobile
The apps built for email generally have a lot of funding, they tend to be high quality including very good search
The mbox standard is not going away any time soon since it's used as an archival format by the Library of Congress of the USA
Sharing of notes is integrated directly in the system in the form of email
Adding multi-media to notes is included in the system
If you add more notes to previous notes, you have a record of the date of each amendment
Sync is integrated into the system, you send and it's in a server and every other machine where you have IMAP setup
My notes are where most of the most useful information I use is (email is a huge part of what I do)

Email is now my go to tool for tasks too!

Drawbacks

My notes are mixed in with all of my email
It’s more complicated to backup, email clients tend to be sneaky about what they keep locally and remotely. Means that my backups have to happen on the server side not client side
Searching, although not bad, is not as good as on a regular text file where you have access to all the unix tools. Notmuchmail does a really good job of searching through email. Most email clients have adequate search.
It’s not as easy to switch away from email to other formats. Using jrnl I can easily create different files with my search results
You cannot edit emails; you have to send amendments to yourself

¹⁾

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.