Stop retyping events into your calendar — email them to Mabel instead
Forward any email with event details to Mabel and get back a ready-to-open .ics calendar invite with the time, place, and notes already filled in.
Somebody emails you the details for their July 4th BBQ: starts at 3, address in the second paragraph, "bring a side," gate code at the bottom. You think I should put this in my calendar, and then you don't, because that means switching apps, typing the address, getting the date wrong once, fixing it, and pasting the gate code somewhere you'll never find it.
So the event lives in your inbox, and on the 4th you're searching your email in the car for an address while someone asks if you remembered the potato salad.
What to send
Forward the invitation email to [email protected] and say:
"Can you make this a calendar invite? Put the gate code and the bring-a-side note in the description."
That's the whole job. It works on anything with event details in it: party invitations, dentist appointment confirmations, school concert announcements, a friend's rambling paragraph that happens to contain a date, a time, and a brewery name.
What comes back
A reply with a .ics file attached. Open it and the event drops straight into your calendar, whether that's Apple, Google, Outlook, or something more exotic. For the BBQ, the invite would have:
Mike's 4th of July BBQ Saturday, July 4, 3:00 PM to 8:00 PM 1847 Lakeview Dr, Crystal Lake Notes: Gate code 4417. Bring a side dish. Parking on the street, not the driveway.
Everything that was scattered through the email, now in the one place you'll actually look. The address goes in the location field so your phone can navigate from the event itself, and the stray-but-important details land in the notes where future-you will find them.
If the original email is vague about the year or the end time, Mabel makes a sensible call and tells you what she assumed, so you can catch it if she guessed wrong. And if there are several events in one email, like a school newsletter listing three dates, ask for all of them and you'll get an invite for each.
Pro tip
Mention your time zone if the event isn't local, or if the email came from someone in another one. "I'm in Denver, the sender is in Chicago" is the difference between arriving at a video call on time and arriving at the awkward end of it. For recurring things, say so: "this is every Tuesday through August" gets you a repeating event instead of a lonely single one.
The five seconds it takes to forward an email is the cheapest insurance there is against standing in a driveway on a holiday, phone in hand, asking your inbox where the party is.