Forward the email from school — AI puts the event on the calendar

Tuesday night, 9:34 PM. Olivia has been asleep for half an hour. You sit down on the couch and scroll through the day's inbox. There, between an invoice and a newsletter: "Reminder — field trip Wednesday, pack a lunch". Departure 9:30 AM. You read the sentence, set the phone on the windowsill, doze off.

We all know how this ends. Either you wake up in a panic at 6:45 AM when you're already late, or you remember it at 5 PM the next day, when it's too late. That's not carelessness — that's the school's email and your calendar being two separate systems, with you as the glue between them. That glue runs out around 9 PM.

Today we move the line. Every family in FamilyBoard gets a private alias address that looks something like calendar-c4f2ab9e8d12@familyboard.io. Forward the email there, and the AI extracts time, place, attendees and category — and drops the event as a proposal in the Inbox for you to review. Often before you fall asleep.

Before we built it

Three bad paths:

1. Type it in by hand. Open FamilyBoard, tap +, key in date, time, place, guess which kid it's about, save. Breaks the rhythm. Works one time in three.
2. Leave it in your inbox and hope you remember. You don't remember.
3. Do it tomorrow. You don't do it tomorrow. Tomorrow brings new mail.

Daycares and teachers and clubs and coaches will keep sending emails. It's not their job to integrate with your calendar. So we built the middle layer.

Here's how it works

1. Find your family's alias address. In the app: Settings → Inbox → "My calendar email". You'll see something like calendar-c4f2ab9e8d12@familyboard.io. Tap it to copy. (Shortcut: save it as "FamilyBoard" in Contacts on your iPhone so Mail's autocomplete pulls it up.)

2. Forward the email. Forward as you normally would — Mail app, Gmail, Outlook, all of them work. No special format, no subject line to invent. Because it's an alias, all that's needed is for it to receive a copy of the original email.

3. Review the proposal in the Inbox. Within a minute the proposal shows up in the Inbox tab in the app. The AI has tried to parse time, place, attendees and category (field trip → "school_pickup", homework → "homework"). If your child's name is in the subject line, they're auto-tagged as the attendee. You see a card with "Approve" / "Dismiss". One tap, and the event is on the calendar.

The fourth step — which we don't count as a step because it's "done" — is waking up the next morning with the field trip already in the Today list.

Side facts worth knowing

Privacy. Emails are stored as raw text for 30 days for debugging, then auto-deleted. The AI runs through our own OpenAI proxy; no email text is sent to third parties for logging. And if the alias ever leaks — you shared it with the wrong person, someone is spamming — you can rotate the address from Settings with one tap. The old one stops responding, a new one is generated.

Forwarded emails do NOT auto-tag you as the attendee. The most common mistake a naive AI makes is tagging the parent as an attendee when school sends "Field trip Wednesday — Olivia is coming along". You're not the attendee, Olivia is. We built in a rule: if the email is forwarded (i.e. the sender is the school, not you), the AI doesn't include your own profile in the attendee list. Just the child whose name is mentioned.

Questions we get

What if the AI doesn't understand? The proposal shows up with a low-confidence indicator (no "Confident" badge), and you can edit time, place, and attendees before approving. The review takes 15 seconds. The AI isn't infallible, but it gives you a first draft that often saves 90% of the work.

Can I forward to multiple families? Each family has its own alias address. If you're a member of two families (your own + a step-family) each gets its own inbox. You decide where to forward.

What if the email is in another language? Works. The AI parses English, Spanish, German, French, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian. If you forward a bilingual email from an international school it still lands correctly — we extract time and place primarily, not the language wrapper.

Try it now

Build 36 and later on TestFlight. Open Settings → Inbox → My calendar email, copy the address, forward your next school email there. Within 60 seconds the proposal will be in the Inbox. You can rough-sort 20 emails in one sitting — we have plenty of quota.

If you've been sitting there enviously eyeing Calendly, thinking "why isn't there an equivalent for families who get emails from school instead of from clients" — yes, now there is.