Calendar

QuickMail has a full, keyboard-first calendar. You can create and edit your own appointments, keep repeating events, get reminders, respond to meeting invitations, and — if you connect an online account — see and (for some providers) change the events already on your Microsoft, Google, or iCloud calendar. Everything is stored locally so the calendar works offline.

This page is long because the calendar does a lot. If you just want the essentials: press Ctrl+Shift+C to open the calendar, use the Up and Down arrows to move through your events, and on any appointment press Tab once for a details box with everything about it or Enter to open the full appointment. Press N to create a new one. The rest of this page fills in the detail, including a clear list of what the calendar does and does not do.

Opening the Calendar

There are two ways in:

• Press Ctrl+Shift+C from anywhere in the main window.
• Select the Calendar node in the folder tree. It sits alongside your mail folders.

Either way, the message list is replaced by your list of events, and a small toolbar appears above it with buttons for the views, date navigation, and creating or editing appointments. Everything on that toolbar has a keyboard shortcut too, listed at the end of this page.

The calendar needs QuickMail’s local cache, so it is not available when you run QuickMail in online mode (--online). In that mode the calendar announces that it is unavailable.

Calendars (sources)

Expand the Calendar node in the folder tree to choose which events you are looking at:

• All Calendars — everything, merged together.
• Local Calendar — only the appointments you created in QuickMail, stored on this computer.
• One entry per account — the events from each account you turned calendar sync on for (see Connecting an online calendar). Selecting the account shows all of its calendars merged.
• Each calendar under an account — if an account has more than one calendar (for example iCloud’s Home, Family, and Work, or several Google or Outlook calendars), each appears as its own node beneath the account, so you can look at just that one.

Selecting a source filters the list to it. “All Calendars” is the usual choice for day-to-day use.

Choosing a default calendar for new appointments

If most of your appointments belong on one calendar, tell QuickMail which one and it will open the appointment editor on that calendar every time.

1. In the folder tree, move to the calendar you want — Local Calendar, an account, or one of the calendars beneath an account.
2. Open the context menu with Shift+F10 or the Applications key (or right-click).
3. Choose Use as Default Calendar for New Appointments.

QuickMail confirms the choice in the status bar and announces it, and the calendar is marked (default) in the folder tree — its name is announced as “…, default calendar” — so you can always tell which one is set. The choice is remembered between sessions.

To go back to saving new appointments on your local calendar, choose Clear Default Calendar from the same menu.

Two things this does not do. It does not change which events you are looking at — that is still whatever source you have selected in the tree. And it is only a starting point: the Calendar picker in the appointment editor still lets you send any individual appointment somewhere else.

All Calendars cannot be the default, because it is several calendars at once and so names no single place to save to. If you choose it, QuickMail says so and leaves your existing default alone.

Both commands are also in the Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P) — as Use as Default Calendar for New Appointments and Clear Default Calendar — and you can assign them keys in File → Settings → Keyboard Shortcuts.

The four views

Your events can be shown four ways. Switch between them with the toolbar buttons or these keys while the event list has focus:

• Agenda (press A) — a running list of upcoming events, oldest first. This is the default and the simplest to browse. Press T to filter it down to just today, and T again to show everything.
• Day (press D) — a single day’s events.
• Week (press W) — one week, starting on whatever your Windows region setting uses as the first day of the week.
• Month (press M) — a grid of the whole month. Arrow keys move day by day and week by week; press Enter on a day to open that day in Day view.

The header above the list always tells you which view and which period you are looking at (for example, “Week of March 9 to March 15”).

Moving around the calendar

In Day, Week, and Month views:

• Ctrl+Left and Ctrl+Right move to the previous or next day, week, or month (whichever view you are in).
• T jumps back to today.
• Ctrl+G opens Go to Date: type or pick a date, then press Go. Day, Week, and Month views keep their view and recenter on the date you chose; from the Agenda list, Go to Date switches to Day view for that date. A Go To Date… button on the toolbar does the same thing.

(In Agenda view there is no “previous/next period” — the list is already continuous — so Ctrl+Left/Right do nothing there, and T toggles the today filter instead of jumping.)

Reading an appointment

Move through the list with the Up and Down arrows. The list has Subject, When, Status, and Calendar columns; the Calendar column shows which calendar the appointment belongs to — for example Apple: Family, or Local for an appointment you created here. Each row is announced as a short summary that includes the calendar — for example, “Team standup, today 10:00 to 10:30, Accepted. Location: Zoom, calendar Apple: Family.”

From any event you have two quick ways to see more:

• Press Tab once to move into a details box below the list that shows the full appointment (title, when, whether it repeats, location, and for meeting invitations the organizer and your response status), read from the top so a screen reader can review it line by line.
• Press Enter to act on the appointment. On an invitation you haven’t answered yet, Enter opens a short menu — Accept, Tentative, Decline, or Open full appointment — so you can respond right from the calendar (see below). On your own appointment, Enter opens the editor; on an invitation you’ve already answered, it opens the source email.

If you prefer each row spoken with field labels (“Subject …, when …, location …”) instead of the concise form, turn on Show field labels in the calendar event list in Settings → General. It takes effect immediately.

Responding to a meeting invitation

Invitations you receive by email show in the calendar with a Pending status until you answer them. You can respond without opening the email:

1. Arrow to the pending invitation and press Enter. A menu opens with focus on the first choice.
2. Choose Accept, Tentative, or Decline — or Open full appointment to read the original email instead. Press Escape to close the menu without responding.

QuickMail sends your reply to the organizer from the account that received the invitation and updates the appointment’s status, so it no longer shows as pending. Accept, Tentative, and Decline are also in the Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P) when a pending invitation is selected.

You can also answer from the email itself. Open the invitation and the message starts with a short card giving the title, when the meeting is, where, and who organized it, followed by Accept, Tentative, and Decline. The card is worth reading even when you plan to answer elsewhere: for many invitations it is the only place the date and time appear at all — a meeting sent from Outlook for a Zoom call is a body of join links and dial-in numbers, and the when is carried in the attachment rather than written out. The card appears however you have QuickMail set to open messages, and in a message window the three responses are on that window’s Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P) as well.

Creating an appointment

Press N (or the New toolbar button) to open the appointment editor. It is a normal window you can tab through:

• Title — required.
• All day — check this for an all-day event; the time fields then switch off. Turning it back off restores the times you had.
• Starts / Ends — a date and a time for each. See Entering dates and times below.
• Location — optional.
• Repeat — leave as “Does not repeat” for a one-off, or set up a repeating appointment (see below).
• Notes — free text.
• Calendar — when you have a Microsoft, Google, or iCloud account connected, a picker lets you choose where the new appointment is saved: your Local Calendar or a connected account. For iCloud the picker lists each of your Apple calendars (Home, Family, …) so you can choose which one. With no connected calendar this picker does not appear and everything is saved locally. The picker starts on your default calendar if you have set one, and on Local Calendar if you have not.

Press Enter (or the Save button) to save, or Escape to cancel. If something is wrong, QuickMail puts focus on the field at fault and shows the reason on an error line above the buttons; the message clears itself as soon as you fix it.

Entering dates and times

Every date and time field in the appointment editor works the same way, and so does the date in Go to date. Each one is an ordinary edit field: you can type into it, and you can change it with the arrow keys without typing anything.

In a date field:

In a time field:

Stepping a time past midnight moves the date with it, so 11:50 PM stepped up becomes 12:00 AM the next day.

You can also just type. Dates accept “8/3”, “August 3”, “2026-08-03”, “today”, “tomorrow”, “friday”, “next tuesday”, a bare day number like “3” for that day of the month shown, and offsets like “+7”, “-3”, “+2w”, “+1m”, “+1y”. Times accept “9”, “930”, “9:30”, “9:30 AM”, “9p”, “14:30”, “noon”, “midnight”, and offsets like “+30” or “-15”. Press Enter or move to another field to apply what you typed; if it isn’t something QuickMail can read as a date or a time, the field puts its previous value back.

The end follows the start. When you change the start date or start time, the end moves by the same amount, so a 30-minute appointment stays 30 minutes long and you are never sent back to fix an end you didn’t touch. Changing the end directly sets a new length, which the start then preserves from that point on.

Repeating appointments

In the editor’s Repeat field choose Daily, Weekly, Monthly, or Yearly. You can then set:

• Every N — for example “every 2 weeks.”
• Until — an optional date the repetition stops on.
• On days (Weekly only) — check the days of the week it should fall on. Leave them all unchecked to repeat on the same weekday as the start date.

When you later edit or delete one occurrence of a repeating appointment, QuickMail asks whether you mean this event only or all events in the series:

• This event only — changes (or removes) just that one date and leaves the rest of the series alone.
• All events in the series — changes (or removes) the whole repeating appointment.

Editing and deleting

• Press E (or the Edit button) to edit the selected appointment.
• Press Delete (or the Delete button) to delete it. QuickMail always confirms before deleting.

What you can change depends on where the appointment lives:

• Your own (Local Calendar) appointments — fully editable and deletable.
• Single events from a connected Microsoft, Google, or iCloud calendar — editable and deletable; your change is sent back to that account.
• Repeating events from a connected online calendar — read-only for now; QuickMail tells you so rather than changing them.
• Meeting invitations — read-only. QuickMail explains why instead of failing silently.

If saving a change to an online account ever fails, QuickMail saves your appointment to the Local Calendar instead so your work is never lost, and tells you it did.

Events your account will not let QuickMail change

Some events on a connected calendar are managed by the provider itself, not by you, and the provider refuses to let any outside mail or calendar program edit or delete them. Google is the one you are most likely to meet. Its protected events are:

• Birthdays — generated from your Google Contacts, usually titled “Happy birthday!”
• Out of office
• Working location
• Focus time
• Events Gmail created for you from a message, such as a flight, hotel, or delivery.

Pressing Delete or saving an edit on one of these fails, and QuickMail currently reports it only as “Could not update your online calendar.” The event is not damaged and nothing is lost — Google simply declined the change. A clearer message naming the reason is planned.

What to do instead, depending on the event:

• Birthday — it follows the contact, so change or clear the birthday on that person in Google Contacts. To stop seeing birthdays altogether, hide the Birthdays calendar in Google Calendar’s settings; QuickMail will stop showing them at the next sync.
• Out of office, Working location, Focus time — create, change, or remove these in Google Calendar on the web or in its mobile app, where the special editors for them live.
• An event Gmail created — open the original message in Gmail and remove it there, or turn the feature off in Google Calendar’s settings under events from Gmail.

After making the change on the provider’s side, press F5 in the calendar (or run Sync Calendars Now) to pull the corrected events down.

Repeating events from a connected calendar, and meeting invitations, are read-only in QuickMail for a different reason — QuickMail does not write those back yet. In those cases QuickMail tells you so before anything is attempted.

Reminders

Reminders are off by default. To turn them on, open Settings → General, check Remind me before appointments, and set the Minutes before value (10 by default). When a reminder is due, QuickMail shows a Windows notification and announces it, telling you how long until the appointment and where it is. Each reminder fires once per session.

There is a single reminder lead time for all appointments; per-appointment reminder times and snoozing are not offered.

Exporting an appointment

To share an appointment as a standard calendar file, select it and choose Export Appointment as .ics from the command palette (Ctrl+Shift+P) or the toolbar/menu. QuickMail writes a .ics file you can send to someone or import elsewhere. (Exporting one occurrence of a repeating appointment exports the whole series.) This action has no default keyboard shortcut, but you can assign one in File → Settings → Keyboard Shortcuts.

Searching your appointments

Press Ctrl+Shift+S while the calendar is open to search. Type to filter the list by title, location, or notes; the count of matches is announced as you type. Press Escape to clear the search and return to the full list.

Responding to meeting invitations

When you open an email that contains a meeting invitation, QuickMail adds an event card to the top of the message with three buttons: Accept, Tentative, and Decline. Choosing one sends your reply to the organizer and updates your calendar right away — no restart or refresh needed. If the invitation has been cancelled by the organizer, the card says so instead of offering buttons, and the matching calendar entry is removed. From the calendar list, pressing Enter on an invitation-based event opens the original email it came from.

Connecting an online calendar

Calendars connect per account, the same way contact sync does. When you add an email account — or later, in Manage Accounts — check Sync calendar from this account and QuickMail shows that account’s calendar in the Calendar view. Nothing is synced until you check the box, and unchecking it removes that account’s events again. The checkbox is offered for the providers QuickMail can read:

Turning it on for an account you already have: open Manage Accounts, select the account, and check Sync calendar from this account. It applies immediately — a Calendar → [account] node appears in the folder tree and the events sync in the background. Unchecking it removes them.

Connected calendars refresh automatically in the background (roughly every 15 minutes, and once shortly after startup). Press F5 to refresh on demand, or use Sync Calendars Now from the command palette. Syncing is a one-directional download plus, for Microsoft and Google, the single-event write-back described above; it never opens a sign-in prompt on its own — if an account needs you to sign in again for calendar access, QuickMail tells you.

What the calendar does and does not do

To set expectations clearly:

It does:

• Let you create, edit, and delete your own appointments, including all-day and repeating ones.
• Show four views (Agenda, Day, Week, Month) and jump to any date.
• Remind you before appointments (when you turn reminders on).
• Respond to meeting invitations and keep your reply in sync.
• Download events from Microsoft, Google, and iCloud calendars, and create, edit, and delete single (non-repeating) events on any of them.
• Export any appointment as a .ics file.

It does not (yet):

• Work in online mode — it needs the local cache.
• Send repeating appointments to an online account (repeating appointments are saved to the Local Calendar).
• Edit or delete repeating events that came from an online calendar (repeating server events are read-only).
• Edit or delete the events your provider manages for you — Google birthdays, out-of-office, working location, focus time, and events Gmail created from a message. Google blocks this for every outside program, not just QuickMail; see Events your account will not let QuickMail change.
• Connect calendars from generic CalDAV servers other than iCloud (Fastmail, Nextcloud, and the like).
• Subscribe to public .ics calendar feeds (holidays, sports schedules, and the like).
• Offer multiple named calendars, calendar colors, per-appointment reminder times, or reminder snoozing.

By default, invitations you have declined are hidden. Showing them is an advanced option set in the configuration file (ShowDeclinedEvents) and takes effect after a restart.

Repeating appointments are expanded for browsing from about a week ago through the next twelve months; events far outside that window may not appear in the continuous Agenda list until you navigate to their date.

Calendar keyboard shortcuts

These work while the calendar list (or, where noted, the Month grid) has focus:

Export as .ics, the invitation responses (Accept, Tentative, Decline), and the two default-calendar commands are available from the command palette (Ctrl+Shift+P) and have no default key until you assign one.