Calendar

InboxQL has a calendar, and you may already have one in it. Every invitation you have ever been sent arrived as mail with a calendar part attached; InboxQL reads those into an Invitations calendar on its own, with no account to connect. Connect Google Calendar or an Exchange Server, and their calendars appear beside it.

Open it from Go → Calendar (g c). File → New event starts one from anywhere, and File → Import calendar and Export calendar move .ics files in and out of your own calendar.

The views

Day, week, month and agenda, with today, the previous and the next period in the toolbar. On the keyboard: t for today, ← and → to move, d w m a for the views, n for a new event.

• Click an empty slot to start an event there.
• Drag an event to move it — to another day in the week view — and drag its bottom edge to change its length. Everything snaps to a quarter of an hour.
• Click an event for its card.

Each calendar has a colour, and the list on the left shows or hides it. Some events look different on purpose:

Cards due is the board’s due dates, drawn as all-day entries: click one to open the card, drag it to another day to change when it is due, and hide them like any calendar. See Your board.

An event’s card

When and where, how it repeats, the Join button for a Meet, Teams, Zoom or Webex link, who is invited and how each has answered, and — for an invitation — Yes, Maybe and No. If the event came by mail, the card links to the message, and the message shows the event: an invitation can be answered from the message it came in, with what else is on at that time beside it.

Creating and editing

New event, a click on an empty slot, or n. Title, times (or all day), how it repeats, which calendar, people, where, a meeting link, a description, a reminder, whether it shows you as busy, and whether it is private.

Changing a repeating event asks what the change is for, because these are three different edits:

• Only this one — this occurrence changes; the rest stay.
• This and the ones after — the series ends before this one, and a new series carries on from it with your change.
• All of them — the whole series.

The same question comes when you drag an occurrence of a repeating event, or delete one.

Answering invitations

Yes, Maybe or No on the card, or on the message.

• For an event in a Google or Exchange calendar, the answer goes through that provider, which tells the organizer.
• For an invitation that only arrived by mail, the answer goes back by mail, as a calendar reply the organizer’s calendar understands. It waits in the outbox until you send it, from Intelligence → Waiting for approval or with iql outbox approve <draft-id>.

Connecting Google Calendar

Google lets an app read and change your calendar only through a sign-in with an OAuth client. Until InboxQL has a verified client of its own, you use one from your own Google Cloud project — about five minutes, once:

1. In the Google Cloud console, create a project, and enable the Google Calendar API for it.
2. Under OAuth consent screen, choose External, fill in the names, and add your own Google address as a test user.
3. Under Credentials, choose Create credentials → OAuth client ID, of type Desktop app.
4. In InboxQL, Settings → Calendars → Connect Google, paste the client ID and secret, and sign in.

Google signs you in in a new tab and sends you back to this computer. InboxQL keeps a refresh token, encrypted in your mailbox’s vault, and talks to Google directly — nothing goes through anyone else.

From a terminal:

INBOXQL_GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET=… iql calendar connect google --client-id 1234-abcd.apps.googleusercontent.com

Every calendar you can read appears: your own, shared ones, and subscriptions like holidays. Ones shared with you as free/busy only do not, because there is nothing in them to show.

Connecting Exchange Server

For an Exchange Server your organisation runs itself. Settings → Calendars → Connect Exchange: the EWS address (usually https://mail.example.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx), your username (DOMAIN\user or your address), password, your address, and the sign-in method — Windows sign-in (NTLM) for most servers, Basic if your administrator says so. InboxQL tests the sign-in before saving anything.

INBOXQL_EXCHANGE_PASSWORD=… iql calendar connect exchange \
  --url https://mail.example.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx --username 'CORP\me' --email me@example.com

Exchange Online (Microsoft 365) is not supported this way. Microsoft is switching EWS off there — from October 2026, entirely by April 2027 — and an Exchange Online calendar needs a different connection, which is planned.

Sync

Connected calendars sync every five minutes, after every mail sync, and whenever you press Sync now. Changes you make go up on the next pass — straight away in practice.

If the same event was changed somewhere else before your change arrived, InboxQL does not overwrite it. The calendar shows the other version, and Waiting for you lists your change as a conflict, so you can make it again if you still want it.

An invitation that is in both your mail and a connected calendar shows once, from the calendar, which is the copy that can change.

Reminders

Set one on any event. When it comes due, every open InboxQL window shows it, with Join and Open; press Allow notifications once and the browser shows it as a system notification too, even when the tab is in the background. With no window open, InboxQL asks your operating system to show it (macOS and Linux).

A computer that was asleep does not wake to a pile of old reminders: only ones that came due in the last ten minutes are shown.

Asking questions

The calendar is a query like everything else — one row per occurrence:

in:events next:7d                                  what is on this week
in:events status:needs-action                      invitations you have not answered
in:events attendee:*@acme.com after:90d | sum hours by week
in:events organizer:me() -has:conference           meetings you set up with no link
in:events | sum hours by attendee                  who your time goes to
in:events during:2026-10-15T14:00                  what is on at that moment

The query language has every field.

Agents and the calendar

An AI agent driving InboxQL can read the calendar and find times, and it can propose changes — a new event, a move, a cancellation, an answer to an invitation. A proposal changes nothing and tells nobody: it shows on the calendar, striped, and under Waiting for you, until you Approve or Reject it. Each one there says when it would be; click it to go to that day with the event open beside it. From a terminal, iql calendar approve <id> — which works only at a terminal, typed by a person.

On the command line

iql calendar agenda --next 7d
iql calendar create --title "Planning" --start "2026-10-15 10:00" --duration 90m --repeat "FREQ=WEEKLY;BYDAY=MO"
iql calendar respond <event-id> accepted
iql calendar changes
iql calendar import holidays.ics
iql calendar export --calendar local --out mine.ics

iql help calendar lists everything.

Coming next: time tracking

For people who bill their time, the calendar is most of a timesheet already. The next piece lets you say who each meeting is charged to — per occurrence, since a weekly call can be billed to a different client each week — with suggestions from the people in the meeting and the mail it came from, and | sum hours by charge as the timesheet. The data model already has a place for it.