How to turn school emails into family calendar events
In short
Famileze gives every family its own private email address. Forward a school, kindy or club email to it, and the Famileze iPhone app reads out the dates it finds and offers each one for your family calendar. Nothing is added until you tap Add, and you can limit who is allowed to email the address.
Why this helps
School news arrives as long newsletters, PDFs and photographed flyers, and the date that matters is usually halfway down. Famileze does the reading, shows the sentence each date came from, and leaves the decision with you. Both parents see the same calendar, so the swimming carnival only has to be noticed once.
Step by step
1. Find your family's email address
- Open Famileze and tap the ☰ menu, then Inbox.
- While your inbox is empty, the address sits in the middle of the screen under 📥 Your family's private inbox. Once mail arrives, it moves to the top, under 📥 Your family inbox. It starts with famileze-, then a long string of letters and numbers, and ends in @famileze.app. It is unique to your family.
- Tap 📋 to copy it.
Nobody wants to type that address, so save it once. To put it on another phone, yours or your co-parent's, tap ▦ (Show a QR for another device), choose 👤 Save contact, and point that phone's camera at the code. It offers to save Famileze Family Inbox to Contacts. On this phone, tap ✉️ Test from this phone in the same sheet: it opens an email already addressed to your inbox, and once sent, your mail app remembers the address.
2. Forward a school or club email
In your usual mail app, forward the email to Famileze Family Inbox. Attachments come too.
Back in Famileze, open Inbox. To check for new mail straight away, pull down on the screen or tap ⟳ Check now.
3. Look at the dates it found
Each email shows as a card. Under 📅 Dates found is every date the app read, with the time if one was given. Tap a date to see the exact sentence it came from, so you can tell "Year 3 excursion" from "notes due back".
A few things it handles for you:
- Photos and PDFs. A term calendar snapped off a noticeboard, a flyer or a PDF newsletter is read on your iPhone, and its dates join the list. If a photo hasn't been read yet, tap 🔎 Read the attached photo for dates.
- Repeats. "Every Tuesday" is offered as a repeating event. "For six weeks" becomes exactly six dates.
- Old news. Dates already past, like a recap of last term, are folded away behind one line.
4. Approve each date
- Tap Add to put a date on the family calendar.
- Tap ✏️ first if you want to change the title, date or time, then Save to calendar.
- Tap ✕ to dismiss a date you don't need. Dismissed dates can be restored.
- To link an event to one child, choose their name in the second dropdown (it starts on 👪 Family) before you tap Add.
If something very like it is already on the calendar that day, Famileze asks rather than guessing: ✓ It's the same — don't add again, or ＋ Add anyway — it's a different event.
5. File the email
The first dropdown suggests a folder, such as School or Sport & Activities, based on what the email is about and where you filed this sender's last email. Change it if you like, then tap 📥 File. Filing only files: it never adds dates you didn't tap. Filed emails move to Filed & done.
6. Choose who can email the address
Out of the box, anyone with the address can email it. To lock it down, tap 🔒 Choose who can email this inbox (or, once mail has arrived, 🔓 open to anyone · manage under the address), then ＋ Add an email address.
One thing catches people out. When you forward an email, it arrives from you, not from the school. So add your own address (there is a ＋ Add my own email button) and your co-parent's. If you've given the address straight to the school or a club, add their sending address too.
If someone is turned away, Famileze doesn't hide it. A card appears saying they tried to email your inbox and asking Do you know them? Tap Have a look, then ✓ I know them — allow or Not them. The sender is never told they were turned away.
Is forwarded email encrypted?
Not end to end, and we'd rather say so. Almost everything in Famileze is encrypted on your phone before it leaves, so what is stored in the cloud is unreadable to us. Email sent to your family address is one of three named exceptions, because someone outside your family is at the other end.
That email arrives as ordinary email, so it reaches our relay in readable form. It waits there, with its attachments, until your devices collect it, and is deleted automatically after 30 days at the latest. Once your device has pulled it in, it becomes encrypted family content like everything else. We don't read it. If you'd rather not use email at all, nothing else in the app depends on it.
The dates themselves are read on your iPhone by a small, rule-based date reader, not by a cloud AI or a language model.
What it doesn't do
- It doesn't sync with Google or Outlook calendars. Events live in the Famileze family calendar.
- It never adds anything on its own. Every date waits for your tap.
- It won't read every date perfectly. It shows the sentence each date came from so you can check before you add.
- The family address isn't a second inbox. Mail is deleted after 30 days, so file what matters.
Questions parents ask
- Can my partner see the events I add?
Yes. Dates you add land on the family calendar, which a co-parent you've invited sees on their own phone.
- Does an AI read my school emails?
No. Famileze uses no cloud AI and no language model. Dates are found by a deterministic date reader running on your iPhone.
- What if the school only sends a photo of the term planner?
Forward it anyway. The iPhone app reads the words in the photo on the phone itself and looks for dates in them.
- What happens to the email after I file it?
It is kept in the folder you chose, inside your encrypted archive. The copy on our relay is deleted within 30 days.
Related
- A family app without AI: why Famileze uses none
- End-to-end encrypted family photos, explained
- Co-parenting with one shared family archive
- A private family photo timeline
Famileze is coming to iPhone. Join the waitlist to hear the day it launches.