I tried to do this a while back with recent versions of Word and Notes and
did not get very far. I believe it used to work with older versions of
Word/Notes.

You will almost certainly need to ensure that
a. Notes is set up to be your current e-mail program (e.g. in Internet
Explorer|Tools|Internet Options|Programs if you have IE on your system)
b. Notes is set up to use MAPI (I cannot remember how you can ensure this
c. Notes is set up in your current MAPI profile, which I suspect will be
extremely hard to achieve if you do not have Outlook on your system. Last
time I tried to achieve this, some error always occurred.

There are some commercial third party products out there that may help, but
I cannot recommend any of them as I've never used them.