Connect Your Email & Calendar

What this module does, and what we set up today.

The Email & Calendar module turns your inbox and calendar into things Cowork can actually work with. Once they're connected: a morning brief that reads overnight emails and flags the ones that need you; Cowork drafting replies on demand; an on-demand inbox triage; your day's calendar on your dashboard. None of that works without the connections we set up in this lesson.

What you'll have at the end of this lesson

Cowork connected to your email — Gmail directly, Outlook via the Microsoft 365 connector, or via a workaround if you're on something else.
Cowork connected to your calendar — Google Calendar directly, with bridges for Apple Calendar and Outlook.
A short verification — one quick test so you know it's working before the rest of the module relies on it.

This lesson is shorter than it looks because most of the actual setup is "tell Cowork to help me connect X." The lesson tells you what to ask for; Cowork walks you through the steps that are specific to your account.

The standard path — Gmail and Google Calendar.

If you use Gmail and Google Calendar, this is the easiest path. Anthropic has official connectors for both. Setup happens once.

Open Family Manager. Start a new chat. Send:

Connect Gmail and Google Calendar

Help me connect the Gmail connector and the Google Calendar connector to Cowork. Walk me through whatever I need to click and authorize on my end. When we're done, confirm both are connected and tell me one quick check I can run to verify they're working.

Cowork walks you through the authorization flow for each connector. You'll click through a Google sign-in screen for each (Gmail and Google Calendar are separate connectors, so you authorize them separately), grant the permissions Anthropic asks for, and come back to Cowork. When both are green, Cowork confirms.

What Cowork can do once these are connected.

Gmail: Cowork can read your inbox, search threads, list labels, see drafts, and create new drafts. (It does NOT send emails on its own without your approval — drafts wait for you to review and send.)
Google Calendar: Cowork can list your calendars, list events, get event details, create new events, update events, respond to invites, and suggest times.

These two connectors are the foundation for everything else in this module.

If your setup is different.

Plenty of moms aren't on Gmail and Google Calendar. The course can't write a separate lesson for every possible setup — but you don't need one. This is the perfect moment to use the ask-Claude-first push-back pattern: tell Cowork what you actually use, and ask what it needs to work with it.

When your setup is different

I use [your email provider] for email and [your calendar app] for my calendar. What would unlock email and calendar access for you on my setup? Walk me through the options — direct connector, a bridge through Google, anything else — and tell me the tradeoffs so I can pick.

Cowork knows the specific gotchas for each provider — which connectors require a business account versus a personal one, which calendar workarounds need a URL format swap, which providers don't have a direct path and need a forwarding setup instead. Ask, and Cowork walks you through the path tailored to what you actually have.

Verify it works.

One quick test to confirm Cowork can actually see your email and calendar. Send this in Family Manager:

Verification test

Quick check that the connectors are working. Tell me: how many unread emails I have right now (just the count, not the contents), and the next three things on my calendar in the next week (event title, date, time only — keep it brief). If either of these doesn't work, tell me what failed and what to do about it.

If you get a clean answer with real numbers, you're good. If Cowork can't reach one of them, it'll tell you specifically what's wrong (re-authorize the connector, wrong account, etc.). Fix what Cowork flags, run the verification again.

A word about email privacy.

Cowork now has access to read your inbox. That's powerful and also worth being thoughtful about. A few things worth knowing:

Cowork reads emails when you ask it to (the morning brief, a triage request, etc.) — it's not constantly scanning in the background unless you've set up a scheduled task that does that.
Per Anthropic's data policy, Cowork tasks aren't used to train models without your opt-in. Your emails don't become training data unless you specifically choose that.
If you want to scope what Cowork sees, you can filter to specific labels or accounts when you ask. Example: "Only look at emails labeled 'Family' for the morning brief."

Next: The Morning Email Brief.

Now that Cowork can read your inbox, the next lesson sets up the workflow that actually makes use of it — a scheduled task that runs every morning, reads what came in overnight, flags what needs you, and pushes a quick summary to your dashboard.

Continue to The Morning Email Brief →