Support

Caterpillar Calendar reads the school and sports email you already get, pulls out the dates and the things your family has to do, and puts them where you actually look.

The app is empty. Is it broken?

Almost certainly not. We don't go through your old mail on our own. A newly connected inbox starts watching from 48 hours before you connected it and moves forward from there, so the first day or two is often quiet — especially outside a season.

Two things do reach further back, and you press both of them: approving a sender on the Review screen, and Scan last 30 days on a sender in Settings. Each reads only that one sender's last 30 days.

When you approve a sender, we ask first: Scan 30 days back or Just going forward. Either way we watch them from then on — the difference is only whether we read the month behind them.

If you know a particular coach or school office has been emailing you, open Settings → Senders, find them, and use Scan last 30 days. That pulls in their recent mail on demand. It's a button you press, not something we do to your whole mailbox.

Something got added to my calendar that I didn't want

Open the Review tab. Every event we found is there with the sender it came from, in one of two states.

Already on your calendar. These are the ones we were confident about, and we wrote them without asking. The button on those reads Remove from calendar — using it deletes the real event, not just the card.

Waiting for you. These are the ones we weren't sure about. Nothing has been written anywhere yet: add it, edit the details first, or swipe and tap Not for us.

If you delete an event from your calendar yourself, that's final; we won't put it back.

To stop a sender entirely: Settings → Senders, find them, and block them. Blocking is the one state where we never open the message — we still see who it was from, when it arrived, and the subject line, but the body is never fetched and nothing is extracted.

Why did (or didn't) you find this event?

Settings → Activity is a receipt for the last seven days: what arrived, who sent it, and what we decided about each message. Every row drills into the real items behind the number.

Can I use an inbox that isn't Gmail?

Not yet. This version connects Gmail only, and writes events to the Google Calendar that comes with it. You can see where events are going under Settings → Write events to.

What happens to my email?

We read new messages to find dates and obligations, and we keep those details plus the sender's address — not the message bodies or attachments. Our service downloads and reads two kinds of attachment, then discards both: a calendar invitation (.ics), and a PDF, whose text we read to find the dates in it. Nothing else is downloaded, and the app on your phone never opens an attachment at all. When a message looks like it might carry a date, its text — together with any text we pulled out of an attached PDF — is sent to one of our AI providers, Anthropic or OpenAI, to be read; it isn't used to train models. The privacy policy spells out exactly what is kept, including the one subject line we hold on to for every sender, and what happens to information about your children and the people who email you.

How do I stop notifications?

Turn them off in the app, or in iOS Settings → Notifications → Caterpillar Calendar. Nothing else changes; we keep reading mail and filling the Review tab.

How do I delete my account and everything you have?

Settings → Delete account, then confirm twice. That erases your account, the inbox connection, your sender list, your to-dos and the events we created, immediately. Encrypted backups roll off within 35 days.

Events already sitting on your own calendar stay there — they're yours. We just stop managing them.

How do I revoke your access to my mailbox?

From your Google account: myaccount.google.com → Security → Your connections to third-party apps, and remove the connection. For an Apple calendar, revoke the app-specific password at appleid.apple.com. Either one cuts our access off immediately, without needing us.