Meeting booking

Let the people you email book a meeting with you straight from the email. You set up booking types (a 30-minute intro call, a 60-minute demo) on the Meetings page, then add a Meeting booking block to any email. Each recipient sees your next open times and books one in a tap. The meeting goes onto your Google Calendar and they get a confirmation email with a calendar invite.

Connect a calendar

Booking needs a calendar to read your busy times from and to add meetings to. Connect one from Settings → Integrations → Calendars with Connect Google Calendar. The Meetings page links there until a calendar is connected.

MailInApp asks for two calendar permissions only: seeing when you're free or busy, and adding events. It never reads your event details. You can connect up to 5 Google accounts, and pick which one each booking type uses.

If Google stops accepting MailInApp's access (you removed it from your Google account, or changed your password), the calendar shows Access revoked and can't take new bookings until you Reconnect it. Disconnect removes the access from your Google account too. Meetings already booked stay on your calendar.

Only the account owner can connect or disconnect calendars. Editors can use any connected calendar in a booking type.

Create a booking type

On the Meetings page, choose New booking type and fill in:

Name: what the meeting is called in emails and on the invite, for example "30-minute intro call".
Calendar: which connected calendar to check and book into.
Duration (minutes): 5 to 480, in steps of 5.
Buffer (minutes): time kept free before and after each meeting, 0 to 240.
Timezone: the zone your working hours are in. Times in emails are shown in this zone, with the zone named.
Working hours: the hours you take meetings on each day of the week, in the timezone above. A day can have more than one window (+ Add hours) for a split day, or be left Unavailable.
Bookable up to (days ahead): how far ahead people can book, 1 to 60 days.
Minimum notice (hours): how soon a meeting can start, so nobody books you for five minutes from now. Up to 720 hours.
Max meetings per day: optional. Once a day has this many meetings of this type, it offers no more times.
Where: Google Meet (a Meet link is created for every meeting), Phone call (your number) or Other (an address or your own meeting link).

Open times are the slots inside your working hours, one meeting length apart from the start of each window, that don't overlap anything busy on your calendar (plus the buffer). Working hours follow your timezone's daylight saving time changes, so 9:00 stays 9:00 local all year.

Show calendar under a booking type opens a week view of it, in the booking type's timezone: the open times it would offer right now, the times your calendar is busy, and meetings already booked through MailInApp, with your non-working hours and anything outside the booking window greyed out. Page through the weeks of the booking window with the arrows. It reads your calendar fresh each time, and updates by itself when you come back to the tab, so an event you just added in Google Calendar shows up straight away. Use it to check your working hours before you send.

An account can have up to 25 booking types. Deleting one doesn't cancel its meetings: they stay booked and stay on your calendar.

What happens when someone books

The time is checked against your calendar again, at that moment. If it has been taken since the email was sent, the person is offered fresh times instead.
The meeting is added to your calendar with the person as an attendee, and a Google Meet link if the booking type uses Meet.
They get a confirmation email from MailInApp with the details and a calendar invite (.ics). Google doesn't send them a second invite.
The confirmation email has a Reschedule or cancel link. It opens a page where they can pick a new time or cancel, in their own timezone. Either one updates your calendar and emails them the change.
You get an email about it at your account's address, and again if they later move or cancel it. Stop these emails at the bottom of it turns them off. If you use the MailInApp mobile app, you get a push notification. The booking appears on the contact's activity and counts toward their engagement score, and a journey with a Meeting booked trigger can start.

A journey only starts for bookings made from an email sent to a contacts list, since a journey runs on a contact in a list. Later steps can use the bookingTypeName, slotStart and meetUrl tags.

Two people can never book the same slot. If they try at the same moment, one booking succeeds and the other is offered fresh times.

Upcoming meetings

The Upcoming meetings list on the Meetings page shows every meeting booked from now on, with the attendee and a Meet link where there is one. Cancel cancels a meeting, removes it from your calendar and emails the attendee a cancellation. A meeting that has already started can't be cancelled from here.

Viewers see the Meetings page read-only.

Privacy

Bookings, booking types and their daily counts are included in your account's data export and deleted with your account. Meetings already on your Google Calendar stay there, since they're your calendar's own events. An attendee on your suppression list doesn't get the confirmation email.