How do I turn on the Google Calendar daily agenda email?
Open calendar.google.com, click the gear icon, go to Settings, pick the calendar under "Settings for my calendars," scroll to "Other notifications," and switch Daily Agenda from None to Email.
Click on the Settings menu (gear icon) and select Settings, scroll down to the Settings for my calendars section in the left sidebar, click on the name of the calendar, and under Other notifications select Email from the dropdown menu next to Daily agenda. The setting lives per-calendar, not account-wide, so you need to repeat this process for every calendar for which you need to activate Daily Agenda emails. If you run a work calendar and a personal one, that means toggling it twice — the same split covered in our guide to work and personal calendars on one iPhone.
One limitation worth knowing before you set expectations: you can only set one daily agenda email per calendar — if you want multiple summaries, set it for the most useful time and check manually at others.
What time does the daily agenda email arrive?
Google sends it early morning and doesn't let you change the hour. Google Calendar can email your Daily Agenda to your inbox at 5am each day — turn it on under Other Notifications and see your whole day before it starts.
That fixed send time is the single biggest complaint about this feature. Currently in Google Calendar, you can receive an email summary of your day's agenda at 05:00AM, which is not useful to many people — for many it would be much more useful to receive it the night before. There's no setting to push it to 7am or to the night before, and Google has shown no sign of adding one. If a fixed 5am email doesn't match how you plan your day, a lead-time setup on individual events — covered in setting different alert lead times per calendar — gives more control than the agenda email ever will.
What does the daily agenda email include?
It lists every event on that calendar for the day, pulled from all calendars you can see, including ones shared with you. Daily emails include events from shared calendars — all visible calendars are included, whether you own them or they were shared with you.
There's one catch for invited events: the Daily Agenda email will only include events for which you confirmed your attendance. A meeting you haven't accepted or declined won't show up in the summary even if it's sitting on your calendar grid. If you're juggling several Google accounts, see our walkthrough on syncing multiple Google Calendars on iPhone for how visibility across calendars actually works on mobile.
Why is my daily agenda email not sending?
The most common cause is a setting that didn't save, followed by the email landing in spam or a different inbox tab. Check the calendar's Other Notifications section again — if it's not there, go back to Notifications settings and confirm the change was saved, and the email may not arrive until the following day since Google doesn't backfill a missed send.
Run through these before assuming the feature is broken:
| Cause | Where to check | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Setting not saved | Calendar settings → Other notifications | Reselect Email, confirm it shows after reload |
| Wrong calendar toggled | Settings for my calendars list | Repeat the toggle on each calendar you check |
| Landed in spam/promotions | Gmail spam folder, Promotions tab | Mark as not spam, move to Primary |
| Workspace admin restriction | Admin console, if on a managed account | Ask IT to allow calendar notification emails |
| No events today | Calendar grid for that day | No email sends on empty days |
If you're on a managed Google Workspace account, an administrator may have disabled this notification type entirely — our post on Google Workspace calendar admin settings for alerts explains what IT controls versus what's user-level. And if the problem isn't the agenda email but actual event alerts failing to fire, that's a separate issue covered in Google Calendar notification settings, explained.
Is an email summary enough to not miss meetings?
No — an email read at 5am tells you what's coming, but it doesn't interrupt you when the first meeting actually starts. It's a planning tool, not an alert system, and the two solve different problems.
A daily agenda email is a static list you glance at once. It won't push through Silent mode, it won't ring if your phone is face-down, and by 9am it's buried under newer mail. That's the same gap we cover in calendar reminder vs alarm — what's the difference: a reminder notifies, an alarm interrupts. For the actual moment a meeting starts, apps like Pealo turn Google Calendar events into real system alarms through AlarmKit, so they ring even on Silent and through Focus — something no inbox digest can do. Setup for that pairing is in our guide to loud alarms for Google Calendar events.
How do I turn off the daily agenda email?
Switch the same dropdown back to None. Go to Notifications, find Daily Agenda, and set it to None — your other notification settings stay active. Turning off the agenda email doesn't touch per-event alerts, popups, or any alarm app connected to your calendar.
Alarms your calendar sets for you
Connect Google, Outlook or iCloud. Pealo arms a real alarm before every event.
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