Fantastical Now Supports Event Detection From Forwarded Emails

Flexibits:

Just forward emails to [email protected] from any email address linked with your Flexibits Account and Fantastical will convert them into events or tasks to quickly add to your calendar. After a few seconds you’ll see detected events appear in Fantastical where you can quickly add them as an event or task. [...]

Emails are processed by Flexibits servers and Google Cloud and then deleted immediately after they are processed. Emails are not used or retained by Flexibits or Google Cloud for AI training purposes.

Events that are detected in emails are stored on Flexibits servers and deleted when you add or discard them in Fantastical.

There are a lot of events in email messages that have always been easy to get into Fantastical (or any other calendar app) because they include an ICS file attachment. Like when I book a flight — I always get an email with an ICS attachment containing the flight details, and I just open that in Fantastical to import it. Forwarding that email to Fantastical would take longer than just opening the attachment. But what about a casual email from a friend or family member that doesn’t come with an attachment?

Here’s an example email I sent to myself from a sort of burner account I have for testing and for doing things like this.

From: Heywood Floyd <heywood••••••••@icloud.com>  
Subject: Party for Hal on Saturday  
Date: June 3, 2025 at 1:22:45 PM EDT  
To: John Gruber <••••••••@daringfireball.net>  

Party at my house is on this Saturday, 12-3 or so.
You don’t have to bring anything.

That was the entire email, which I deliberately wrote in a very casual way (e.g. “this Saturday” instead of an actual date, and “12-3” as the time, without an explicit “pm”). Forwarded to Fantastical’s new event detection address, well under a minute later I got the following suggested event notification from Fantastical on my Mac:

Title: Party for Hal at Heywood Floyd's house  
Location: Heywood Floyd's house  
Date: 7 June 2025, 12:00pm – 3:00pm  
Note: "You don't have to bring anything."

Also included in the Note field was a link to the original message in Mail.

In Apple Mail, Siri also suggested an event from the original email. After clicking “Add”, that event had the following details:

Title: Party with Floyd  
Location: «empty»  
Date: 7 June 2025, 12:00pm – 3:00pm  
Note: «empty»

Nothing in Siri’s auto-detected event was wrong. Both got the date and time right. Siri’s title is fine — in real life, I’d know what that meant. But Fantastical’s title is perfect — it’s a party for Hal, at Heywood’s house. And Siri doesn’t include anything in the Note field, not even a link back to the original message, so it would be up to my own memory to remember where the party was.

To be clear, Fantastical doesn’t just add these events to your calendar. It shows them as suggestions, and there’s a “Preview” button in addition to “Add”. I’ll still preview before adding, but using this service does seem like a decent timesaver for creating new events from casual emails.

★ Tuesday, 3 June 2025