Playbook: Email to Calendar

Objective

Automatically extract dates and events from incoming emails and sync them to the primary family calendar.

Pre-requisites

• n8n
• Paperless-ngx
• LLM (Ollama or OpenAI)
• Google Calendar

Step-by-Step Flow

1. Ingestion: n8n workflow triggers via IMAP on a new email in the Automate/Intake folder.
2. Storage: n8n uploads the email body (as PDF) or any existing PDF attachments to Paperless-ngx with the tag needs-processing.
3. Extraction: n8n calls the LLM with the Date Extraction Prompt, passing the OCR text from Paperless.
4. Verification: LLM returns a structured JSON object containing event_name, start_date, end_date, and location.
5. Action: n8n creates an event in Google Calendar using the data returned by the LLM.
6. Cleanup: n8n updates the Paperless document tag from needs-processing to synced-to-calendar.

Data Contract

Field	Type	Format	Source
event_name	String	Plain Text	Email Subject/Body
start_date	DateTime	ISO8601	Email Body
end_date	DateTime	ISO8601	Email Body
location	String	Plain Text	Email Body

Failure Modes & Recovery

• Extraction Failed: LLM returns "No event found".
  • Detection: n8n check for null fields.
  • Recovery: Tag document in Paperless as automation-failed and send a notification to Matrix.
• IMAP Timeout:
  • Detection: n8n workflow execution error.
  • Recovery: Retry policy in n8n (3 retries).

Variants

• SaaS Only: Replace n8n/Ollama with Zapier and ChatGPT.
• Local Only: Replace Google Calendar with Radicale via CalDAV.