Make a note or a task from a message

Turn a flagged message into a note or a task, with its attachments, and get back to the message from it later.

Read a flagged message

Choose Mail in the sidebar. The messages you have flagged are listed under the mailbox they came from. A mailbox's heading folds away, and stays folded until you open it again. If one mailbox cannot be reached, its heading says so and the others go on working.

Click or tap a message to open it — beside the list on the Mac and iPad, on its own screen on the iPhone. You see the subject, who sent it and when, and, if you have more than one mailbox, which one it arrived in.

A message from an IMAP mailbox opens in NotaBene: its text and files are fetched when you open it. To reply, choose Open in Mail — the message itself opens in Apple Mail, as long as that account is set up in Mail on the device. For an Outlook message, Open in Outlook goes back to the mail.

The commands for a message are in the window's toolbar, the way they are in Mail.

The commands for a message are in a row at the top of the message.

Make a note

Open the message and choose Make a Note.
Name the note — the subject is offered — and confirm.

The note is made with the message inside it and opens straight away. Files that came with the message become the note's own attachments — a PDF stays a PDF. The message is then marked as dealt with and leaves the list.

You can also drag a message onto a notebook in the sidebar to make its note in that notebook.

Add it as a task

Open the message and choose Add as a Task….
Pick the note the task belongs in — type to filter the list. To put it in a new note, choose ＋, then name the note (the subject is offered).

The note opens straight away, with the task in it. The task's activity starts with Made from an e-mail and the subject.

Deal with a message without making anything

To mark a message dealt with yourself, swipe it and choose Hide, or choose Hide from Inbox from its context menu. To switch between Outstanding Mail and Dealt-With Mail, use the filter button — on the Mac just before the Mail title, on iPhone and iPad in the toolbar. A message dealt with by mistake comes back with Put Back in Dealt-With Mail.

Tell a note made from mail

A note made from a message has a blue envelope in front of its name in the note list (after the pin, if it is pinned) and the tag mail. To turn either off, or to use another tag — one of yours, or New Tag… — go to Settings ▸ Mail ▸ Notes Made from E-mail. A note you only picked to hold a task is not marked.

Get back to the message

From a note — open the note's Info panel. The section From an E-mail shows who sent it, the subject, when, which of your mailboxes it was in, and a button that opens the message. This stays even if you turn the mail tag off.
From a task — use the envelope button on the task, beside the link button. It appears only on tasks made from a message; on the Mac, hovering over it names the sender and the subject. An Outlook message opens in Outlook on iPhone and iPad and in the browser on the Mac; an IMAP message opens in Apple Mail. If the message can no longer be found, the task still shows who sent it and what it was about.