Option 1: Add it by hand from your email
Free, built in, and fine for a short email with one or two dates.
- Gmail on a computer: open the email, click the three-dot More menu at the top, then Create event. Google Calendar opens with the email’s subject as the title and the email in the description. Set the date and time yourself, then save.
- Apple Mail: dates in an email are usually underlined or highlighted. On a Mac, hover over the date and click the small arrow; on iPhone or iPad, touch and hold the date. Then choose to create an event or add it to your calendar, check the details and add it.
The catch: a weekly newsletter with ten dates means ten trips through the same steps, and repeating practices have to be set up one by one.
Option 2: Forwarding apps
A growing group of apps handle this automatically. You either forward school emails to a special address or connect your inbox, and the app reads each email and adds the events to your calendar. Some also read photos of paper flyers.
Before you pick one, check three things on its own site: what access it gets to your email (one forwarded message, or your whole inbox), whether it keeps a copy of your emails, and what it costs after any trial. Those answers vary from app to app and change over time, so go by what each app says today.
Option 3: A do-it-yourself Google Apps Script
If you are comfortable with a little code, a Google Apps Script can search your Gmail for emails from your school’s domain, pull out dates and add them to a Google Calendar on a schedule. A public example is school-calendar-script on GitHub, which labels the emails it has already handled so it doesn’t add them twice.
It costs nothing, but you set it up, you give the script access to your Gmail and Calendar, and you fix it when a teacher writes dates in a way the script doesn’t expect.
Option 4: Paste the email into SchoolCal on Telegram
SchoolCal is a free Telegram bot from Hall House Labs. You paste the email text in; it never gets access to your inbox.
- Open SchoolCal on Telegram, tap Start and send your city (like “Charlotte”) so times land in the right time zone.
- Open the school email in Gmail or your mail app, copy the text, and paste it into the chat as a normal message.
- SchoolCal replies with a numbered list of the dates it found (up to 25 per message). Anything it’s unsure about is marked “check this one.”
- Tap the
.icsfile to add them all at once to Apple Calendar, Google Calendar or Outlook, or use the one-tap Google Calendar buttons to add them one at a time.
- Weekly schedules like “practices Tue/Thu 5:30-7” become repeating events, with an end date when the email gives one.
- Dates that have already passed are skipped.
- It reads emails with a rule-based parser, not an AI service, and it never saves your emails.
- Free: 5 emails every 30 days, and only emails where it finds dates count. SchoolCal Plus, $3/month: unlimited emails, reminders in Telegram before events and deadlines, and a Sunday “week ahead” message. Plus saves each event’s title, date, time and place for reminders (never the email) and deletes it 7 days after the event. Details are in the privacy policy.
Tips that save time with any method
- One calendar per kid. Make a separate calendar for each child (and one for the family) and give each its own color. When you add events, pick the right calendar, and the week becomes readable at a glance.
- PDFs and photos of flyers. SchoolCal reads pasted text only; it doesn’t open PDFs or read photos (if you send a photo with a caption, only the caption is read). For a PDF, select and copy its text, then paste it. For a paper flyer, use your phone’s copy-text-from-photo feature (Live Text on iPhone, Google Lens on Android), then paste the text.
- Check times against the email. Whatever tool you use, glance over the list before you add it, especially “early dismissal” times, multi-day events and anything the tool flags.
- Watch repeating events with no end date. If the email doesn’t say when practices end, the repeating event keeps going until you delete it. Add an end date once the season schedule is out.
Common questions
Can SchoolCal read a PDF or a photo of a flyer?
No. It reads text you paste into the chat. Copy the text out of the PDF, or use your phone’s copy-text-from-photo feature on the flyer, and paste that.
Does it work with Apple Calendar or Outlook, or only Google?
All three. The .ics file opens in Apple Calendar, Google Calendar and Outlook. The one-tap buttons are for Google Calendar.
Do I have to forward my emails or connect my inbox?
Not with SchoolCal. You copy and paste the text, so it never has access to your email account.
Is it really free?
Yes, for 5 emails every 30 days, counting only emails where dates are found, with calendar export included. SchoolCal Plus is $3/month for unlimited emails and reminders, and you can cancel any time.