This is a practical guide, not a product pitch. By the end of this walkthrough you will have a working shared family calendar that receives school and clinic events automatically. It covers the three steps that actually take time, and skips the ones that do not.
Assumed starting point: you have a Molo account (free tier works fine for this), you receive school emails in Gmail, Outlook, or Apple Mail, and you use Google Calendar or Apple Calendar as your primary calendar. Variations are noted where the steps differ.
Step 1: Create your Molo forwarding address
When you sign in to Molo for the first time, the onboarding screen shows you your personal forwarding address. It looks like a normal email address. Copy it. You will use it in the next step.
This forwarding address is the only address Molo ever receives emails from, so it is worth treating it like any other account credential. Do not post it publicly. If you ever need to reset it, you can generate a new one from your account settings.
Step 2: Set up forwarding in your email client
This step varies by email provider. The general principle is the same: you are creating a rule that automatically forwards emails from your school's address to your Molo forwarding address.
Gmail: Open Settings, go to Filters and Blocked Addresses, and create a new filter. In the From field, enter your school's email address (this is usually something like [email protected] or [email protected]). In the action step, select Forward to, and paste your Molo forwarding address. Save the filter. From this point, any email from that address will be automatically forwarded to Molo for processing.
Outlook / Microsoft 365: Go to Settings, Rules, and create a new rule. Set the condition to when the sender is your school's address. Set the action to Forward to, and enter your Molo forwarding address. Save and enable the rule.
Apple Mail: Open Preferences, go to Rules, and add a rule. Set the condition to From, enter the school's address, and set the action to Forward Message to your Molo forwarding address.
If you receive school communications from multiple addresses (for example, the main school office and a separate address for your child's year group), you can create a filter for each. You can also simply forward manually, which takes about two seconds per email: open the message, forward to your Molo address, done.
Step 3: Connect your calendar
In your Molo account settings, go to Calendar Connections. The options shown are Google Calendar, Apple Calendar via CalDAV, and Outlook Calendar.
Google Calendar: Click Connect Google Calendar. This opens a standard Google authorisation screen. Molo is requesting permission to create and update calendar events, not to read your existing calendar content. Grant access. Molo will create a new calendar in your Google Calendar called Molo Events, so extracted events appear in their own colour-coded layer rather than mixed in with your personal events.
Apple Calendar (iCloud): This uses CalDAV, which requires generating an app-specific password in your Apple ID settings. Go to appleid.apple.com, sign in, go to Sign-In and Security, and generate an app-specific password labelled something like Molo. Copy the password. Back in Molo, paste the password and confirm your iCloud email address. The connection is then established.
Outlook: Similar to Google: click Connect Outlook, authorise via Microsoft's standard OAuth screen, and events will be written to an Outlook calendar layer.
Step 4: Add a second family member
This step is optional but is what makes the shared aspect actually useful. In your Molo account, go to Family Members and invite another email address. The invited person receives an email with a link to create their own Molo account (or sign in to an existing one). Once they accept, both accounts are linked to the same extracted events, and calendar updates from either person's forwarded emails appear for everyone in the family group.
On the free plan, you can have one family member in the group. The Family plan supports up to four family members, which covers most households with children at different schools or where grandparents or childminders need visibility of the schedule.
What happens after setup
Once these steps are done, the day-to-day experience is: school emails arrive in your inbox, the forwarding rule sends them to Molo, Molo extracts the dates, the dates appear in your shared calendar. You do not need to open the Molo app or interface for routine processing. It happens in the background.
When an email contains a date that is ambiguous (for example, "term starts back on Monday" without a specific date), Molo cannot extract a reliable event and will flag the message for your attention in the app rather than guessing. This is a deliberate design choice: a missed extraction is better than a wrong calendar entry.
A note on what this does not solve
Molo handles emails and email attachments. It does not process: letters that only exist as physical post, updates on school apps that do not send email notifications, or verbal messages from teachers at the school gate. For those, manual entry still applies. The claim is not that Molo replaces all calendar management, but that it handles the email-and-attachment stream, which is where the majority of schedulable school information arrives.
The setup takes a few minutes. The benefit compounds over a term as every newsletter, trip letter, and appointment confirmation goes straight to the calendar without manual copying.