Curious about what's happening at Evernote? Check out the articles below to see all the exciting things we're working on.

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Special Cyber Monday Offer

From December 4, the Evernote Free experience is changing. Going forward, new and existing Free users will have a maximum of fifty notes and one notebook per account. These limits refer to the number of notes and notebooks a user can have in their account at one time: you can always delete unwanted content to remain below the threshold.

In keeping with Evernote’s 3 Laws of Data Protection, and to ensure that you retain full ownership of your data, any Free user who currently has more than fifty notes and one notebook will still be able to view, edit, export, share, and delete existing notes and notebooks. 

These changes will be reflected in Compare Plans and System Limits starting on December 4.


What does this mean for Evernote Free users going forward?

Evernote Free will continue to be available for users who wish to explore Evernote before subscribing, or who are happy with Free’s more basic features. When setting the new limits, we considered that the majority of our Free users fall below the threshold of fifty notes and one notebook. As a result, the everyday experience for most Free users will remain unchanged.

For Free users who have or who want more than fifty notes and one notebook, we recognize that these changes may lead you to reconsider your relationship with Evernote. We hope the Free experience will continue to meet your needs, and that you’ll consider a paid subscription if you’re interested in exploring Evernote’s full potential and supporting its future development. There are exciting plans in store for Evernote, and we’d love for you to experience them.

What kind of work do you support when you subscribe to Evernote?

In the past year alone, the support of our customers has enabled us to improve Evernote’s core infrastructure and build innovative new features. Here are just some examples:

Immediate note content synchronization across devices with Real-Time Editing

Intuitive new AI features, like AI Note Cleanup and AI-Powered Search that make core Evernote functionalities more powerful than ever before

Huge improvements in overall stability thanks to large-scale migrations from the Evernote Monolith backend to independent microservices and other client-side changes

A noticeable increase in speed across all clients as an aggregate of countless small improvements made in the codebase

A lightning-fast initial downsync for Evernote Web after aligning our clients to a single storage system

Reinforced security with an updated two-factor authentication process

A new client navigation technology and architecture that lays the groundwork for exciting future development

Complex improvements like these are key to making Evernote a faster, more reliable, and more powerful tool for all users. They also serve as an essential foundation for even more great changes to come. It’s all made possible thanks to our customers’ continued and dedicated support. 💚

Evernote Free users will see the new limits reflected in their accounts from December 4. Free users who have more than fifty notes and one notebook will still be able to view, edit, export, share, and delete existing notes and notebooks.

Update: Evernote Free accounts will have fifty notes and one notebook

Accessing Evernote from a new browser. Reloading the page following an expired session. Logging back in. Deleting the cache…

All of these are routine activities that every Evernote Web user is familiar with. Each one kicks off a process called an initial downsync, during which all the user’s content is re-downloaded into the browser’s storage system so the user can access their Evernote notes offline.

For the largest Evernote accounts, the entire initial downsync process took up to ten minutes (which is at least nine minutes too long!).

With speed on our minds, we set out to make the downsync process much snappier. We’re delighted with the results—and we’re sure Evernote customers will be, too!

Here’s how we made our sync blazing fast

Unlike Evernote Desktop and Mobile, which use a storage system called SQLite, Evernote Web used IndexedDB—a system that didn’t allow for records to be retrieved in bulk. That meant each customer record had to be downloaded, processed, and stored individually. (Customer records can refer to notebooks, reminders, notes metadata, preferences, widgets, and other important Evernote components.) 

The more notes in a customer’s account, the greater the number of records. And given that some customers have tens of thousands of notes, it’s clear how the whole process might take an infuriatingly long time.

To solve this problem, we updated the Web’s storage system from IndexedDB to SQLite/WASM, SQLite’s web-compatible product. Not only did this make the downsync process incredibly fast, but it unlocked important synergies between Evernote Web and the other clients.

So how fast are we talking? We put Evernote Web to the test. On accounts with only a handful of notes, speed improved by 2x or more. But it’s on larger accounts where the difference is the most significant. Using the old system, it took 285 seconds (almost 5 minutes) to perform the initial downsync on an account with 17,265 notes. With the new system, the downsync on the same account took just 17 seconds… making it nearly 17x faster! 🚀

A few things to keep in mind if you use Evernote Web

Only the latest versions of major browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox) currently support the new downsync. Older versions aren’t compatible with our new storage system, so they’ll default to the old downsync process. 

Evernote Web might not work in Incognito or other private browsers. Since Incognito browsers limit the amount of data that can be downloaded at one time, it’s possible that the initial downsync won’t be performed on larger accounts. In this case, Evernote will need to be opened in a regular browser window instead. For other private browser modes, the downsync will default to the old, slower process. These limitations may change or go away entirely in the future, but we can’t make any promises (ultimately, they’re down to the browser rather than Evernote).

Another step towards a faster, more reliable Evernote

A blazing-fast downsync is exciting. Aligning all our clients (Web, Desktop, Mobile) to a single type of storage system is a game-changer. Creating a unified cross-client storage system didn’t just help us remove a major bottleneck for future performance improvement, but it marks another big step towards making Evernote faster, more stable, and more reliable than ever before.

Web downsync just got over 16x faster!

Yesterday, Evernote experienced an outage between 4:00 am and 6:30 am EDT. By 9:30 am, all logged-in users could use the app as normal. In an effort to limit malicious behavior, we temporarily limited the number of login attempts that could be made from a single account. At 11:30 am today, October 5, we removed the limit on login attempts.

As a result of these actions, some Evernote customers may have experienced the following issues: the inability to log into Evernote, the inability to sync changes, and an overall unresponsive and slow product experience.

A particularly important (and tricky) migration

The outage was triggered when we migrated a large database responsible for managing logins, new registrations, and information related to the user profile away from Evernote’s legacy backend infrastructure—the Monolith.

Over the last few months, we have migrated countless pieces of the backend infrastructure to a more modern and reliable system. Yesterday, we performed the final Monolith data migration. With the completion of this last piece, we can now move forward with transitioning the whole system to a new infrastructure and finally bring Evernote’s backend foundations to a much healthier state.

Moving away from the Monolith in favor of a more decentralized infrastructure has been a goal for the Evernote team for many years, and a few months ago we finally took on this daunting, yet essential, task.

If the name Monolith sounds familiar to you, it’s because I mentioned it a while back when discussing how we’re future-proofing Evernote’s foundations. Essentially, the Monolith is a huge, single Java Enterprise Edition application that powers the storage and synchronization of multiple entities within Evernote. The Monolith is extremely heavy, difficult to manage, and has accumulated significant technical debt over the years.

This last migration was by far the biggest and most technically challenging Monolith migration to date, and also one of the most significant. With it behind us, we’ve finally unlocked enormous potential to make quicker and more impactful improvements going forward.

In an effort to minimize service disruption, we planned to migrate the database at 3:30 am EDT on October 4. However, as we finished the migration and reconnected the clients, the Monolith wasn’t able to process a higher-than-usual number of inbound requests. Unfortunately, we were forced to restart the entire system and gradually reintroduce traffic.

Here’s the timeline of what happened (all times refer to Eastern Daylight Time):

With the migration complete, our servers were overwhelmed by the number of inbound requests as the clients attempted to reconnect

The Monolith was unable to scale to meet the higher demand

We took immediate action and made the decision to temporarily block client requests and allow the servers to restart, which led to the outage

During this time, customers may have experienced the following issues:
- A slow and unresponsive in-app experience
- The inability to sync notes, seeing either an ineffective sync status or an error message stating that sync is temporarily paused
- (If not logged in) The inability to log into Evernote, with either a 429 Error (Too many requests) or a message stating that Evernote was temporarily unavailable

Once the servers were restarted, we began allowing the clients to connect again, prioritizing the note saving functionalities

At this point, some users started seeing their Evernote functionality return to normal

Over the next three hours, we methodically and gradually increased traffic until the majority of Evernote’s core functions were restored

All logged-in users could use the app as normal

In order to continue to protect our system, we temporarily limited the number of login attempts that could be made from a single account
- This was done to prevent potential bad actors from attacking our system and compromising its stability or the security of our customers' data
- Unfortunately, these rate limits apply to bad actors and legitimate users alike—as a result, some customers attempting to log into Evernote may have experienced difficulties

We introduced abuser-specific rate limits and returned global rate limits to their normal threshold

We observed positive changes in Evernote’s performance compared to before the outage, meaning the migration had its intended effect
- The overall latency is lower than before the database migration
- RTE is registering a lower error rate than before the database migration

As of this time, the outage is over and the migration is considered complete—if you’re still experiencing login or sync issues, please contact our team to receive direct support

With the incident behind us, we’re performing a full retrospective of the events leading up to and during the outage, so we can improve our processes in the future. This reflection won’t just focus on technical aspects, but on our communications as well—we should have been much more effective and timely in communicating with you.

In particular, we’ll ensure that status.evernote.com is updated immediately in these circumstances. We did not update that page until 10:30 am yesterday (hours after the issues began), and many confused customers reached out to me after experiencing problems without any further information available on the website. For this, I apologize.

Outages are never pleasant, and we appreciate your patience as we’ve worked on finding a resolution. In this case, the outage was an unfortunate consequence of an otherwise exciting development for the future of Evernote. I hope to share more such (positive!) updates with you soon.

Product lead Federico Simionato provides insight into what caused the recent outage and how the team completed a big milestone for the future of Evernote.

Evernote - October 4 outage, a big migration, and a better infrastructure

Update: October 4 outage, a big migration, and a better infrastructure

Some Evernote users have tens of thousands of notes. 😱

That’s a mountain of information to sift through when quickly trying to recall something. Like, What was the Q3 budget my boss mentioned? Or Does grandma’s recipe for s’mores brownies call for one or two cups of mini marshmallows?

Currently, there are a few ways to find the answers you need, but each has its drawbacks. Trying to remember which notes contain what information gets increasingly difficult as the number of notes grows. Searching requires remembering exact keywords, and you still have to manually open and read the notes to find the information you’re looking for. Personalized organization systems with notebooks and tags are helpful if you’re proactive and consistent with their upkeep—but that hinges on unwavering diligence, and sometimes real life isn’t that accommodating.

These issues were top of mind when we conceptualized a brand new Evernote feature: AI-Powered Search.

AI-Powered Search helps you get the right information from your notes—accurately, quickly, and conveniently. Just enter a question in natural language (like What are the to-dos from yesterday’s meeting?), and AI-Powered Search pulls out the answer from the content of your notes in a matter of seconds. And if you need to filter your notes instead, that’s easily done. Just enter your query and we’ll identify the best keywords to deliver the results you’re looking for.

We all know the frustration of slogging through endless notes to find that all-important nugget of information. Obsessing over the optimal tagging system. Wracking our brains for the right filter. The power of a productivity tool like Evernote comes from it working for you, not causing you more work. AI-Powered Search provides the answers you need, right when you need them, so you can focus on getting things done.

Let’s take the example of Grandma’s brownie recipe. It is pretty famous, after all.

So you want to recreate this delicious family recipe, but—disaster—you’ve forgotten a crucial step. Good thing you have the original saved somewhere in Evernote.

To get the information that’s standing between you and that sweet, sweet gooey goodness, you can navigate over to the Search field, as you normally would. There, you’ll see two search options: Standard (Evernote’s original search feature, which remains available) and AI-Powered.

Selecting the AI-Powered Search option, you then enter your search query using natural language. Basically, that means asking a question similar to how you’d phrase it to a friend—and you can use any language that’s present in your notes. AI-Powered Search then uses one of two specialized AI processes based on your question.

You can phrase your question in either of the following ways:

A direct question. This is where you’re looking for an answer that references specific information within your notes. In this case, How many cups of mini marshmallows are in grandma’s recipe for s’more brownies?

A filter request. This is where you’re looking for a subset of notes matching some specific criteria. In this case, Brownie recipes tagged marshmallows before 2020.

(Pro tip: The power of filter requests is that you can describe complex filtering criteria in your own words, based not only on the content but also on creation date, tags, notebooks, attachments, and more. Think of them as a much faster way to create boolean searches, since you don’t need to worry about matching Evernote’s specific search grammar.)

No matter which kind of query you use, AI-Powered Search takes into account all types of content within your notes—PDFs, Word documents, and images with text—and provides you results within seconds.

If you ask a direct question, AI-Powered Search gives you a concrete answer pulled from the most relevant note or notes, and shows the references used to generate the answer.In the case of grandma’s brownies,You need 2 cups of mini marshmallows.

If you enter a filter request, AI-Powered Search shows you all the relevant notes that match your parameters. The results are more similar to those generated using Standard Search—in this case, you don’t need to rely on existing filtering parameters or more complicated boolean searches.

The more information you store within Evernote, the more helpful AI-Powered Search becomes. Here are just a handful of other ways you can use this new search feature in your day-to-day life: 

Achieving goals: What’s my workout plan for Monday?

Meeting preparation: What were the key takeaways from my call with Linda from Marketing?

Paying bills: Electricity bills past 3 months

Recalling… anything!: Email address for Gwen from last year’s sales conference in Boston

We want to make clear that we created AI-Powered Search as an alternative to, not a replacement for, Standard Search. If you’re happy with things the way they were, then you can continue using it without any disruption. We’re bringing you more search options, not taking any away.

Indeed, you might find it best to use both AI-Powered Search and Standard Search at times, according to the specific use case.

AI-Powered Search is best for getting a direct and succinct answer to a question, especially when searching a large number of personal or shared notes all at once. It’s also a great way to filter your notes if you don’t have a robust organizational system in place.

Instead, Standard Search is best for retrieving one or more notes when you already know the right combination of keywords and filters to find them, or you want to leverage the powerful advanced search syntax.

AI-Powered Search uses a third-party API to generate your search results. This means that each time you use the new feature, a subset of your data is processed externally.

For every search you make, the following is always the case:

Your data is deleted by the third party within 30 days.

Only your most relevant notes are processed. When you input your query, the first thing we do is identify the most relevant notes for that specific query. Those are the only notes processed by the third party to provide you with an answer.

Your data isn’t used to train an Evernote or a third-party AI model. Neither the third party nor Evernote or our parent company Bending Spoons “learn” from your notes or your queries. Each new query is always treated as an independent event.

Given the importance of the topic of data security and privacy, this is worth underscoring: Using AI-Powered Search once doesn’t mean you’re granting carte blanche permission to process your data forever. Each usage is considered an independent event—meaning every time you want to run an AI-powered search query, we’ll ask for your permission to process that specific query, and nothing else. Selecting “Do not show me again” from the associated pop-up doesn’t mean that we then start treating your data differently—it just means we won’t bug you with the pop-up next time.

With much of our focus currently on future-proofing Evernote’s fundamentals, it’s vital that we’re intentional about how we choose to innovate. This means creating new features and tools only when we’re certain that they’ll solve real problems for our customers.

That’s why we’re particularly proud of AI-Powered Search. This newest feature is the result of countless hours spent with Evernote customers and Experts to ensure that we deliver something powerful and useful—and something truly unique to Evernote’s vision of helping you remember everything.

Beyond AI-Powered Search, we’ve started to explore some more, similarly impactful tools. These include some new AI features for the Editor beyond those currently available through AI Note Cleanup. But we’ll leave that for another post!

AI-Powered Search is available on Evernote Desktop and Web from September 11. All users can access it for a limited time before it becomes available only to those with a Personal, Professional, or Teams subscription (some people have been asking: there’s no surcharge). Be aware that it will be in Beta for a while, so some glitches and issues are to be expected. We’ll get them ironed out quickly!

Try it for yourself and let us know what you think via the Forum or by tagging @evernote on social media.

What's new at Evernote

Update: Evernote Free accounts will have fifty notes and one notebook

Web downsync just got over 16x faster!

Update: October 4 outage, a big migration, and a better infrastructure

AI-Powered Search: Helping you recall anything, instantly