calendula

An MCP server that lets Claude Code (or any MCP client) read your Outlook (classic) calendar from WSL.

• Read-only: list the events of a day (or several), or look up the event at a given time with its attendees and body

• Talks to Outlook on Windows through PowerShell and COM: no Microsoft Graph, no admin consent, no tokens

• Keeps what it fetched in memory only; nothing is written to disk (see Caching)

Requirements

• Windows with Outlook (classic) running. The new Outlook has no COM interface and does not work

• WSL: calendula runs in the Linux distribution and calls wscript.exe, powershell.exe and tasklist.exe through WSL interop

• Python 3.11 or later

Related MCP server: Microsoft Calendar MCP Server

Install

uv tool install calendula          # or: pipx install calendula
calendula list                     # prints today's events (checks that Outlook answers)

Register it with Claude Code for all your projects:

claude mcp add --scope user calendula -- calendula

Other MCP clients: run calendula as a stdio server.

Then ask things like "What's on my calendar tomorrow afternoon?" or "Who is in the 14:00 meeting?".

To let Claude read the calendar without asking each time, allow the two read-only tools in ~/.claude/settings.json:

{
  "permissions": {
    "allow": ["mcp__calendula__list_events", "mcp__calendula__get_event"]
  }
}

Tools

Every answer starts with the day and the time it was fetched:

2026-11-05 (Thu)  fetched 2026-11-05 10:32
09:00-10:00  Weekly sync  [Room A]
13:30-14:30  Customer interview

An event that spans several days (a conference, a meeting past midnight) appears on each day it covers. Bodies are kept whole except for blank lines and the Teams join block.

Caching

Fetching takes a few seconds (PowerShell starts, then Outlook answers over COM), so fetched days are kept in the server's memory:

• Today and later are reused for up to 1 hour, then fetched again

• Past days fetched after they ended are kept for the life of the server (one Claude Code session)

• refresh: true always fetches; ask for it when the calendar has just changed

• A request fetches only the days that are missing or stale, in one call

• When fetching fails, the error is returned as is; older copies are never shown instead

Nothing is written to disk. Set CALENDULA_TTL_MINUTES to change the 1 hour.

Command line

calendula                         run the MCP server on stdio (same as `calendula serve`)
calendula list [DATE] [DAYS]      print events, fetched from Outlook now
calendula show TIME [--date DATE] print the event at a time
calendula --version

Troubleshooting

• CO_E_SERVER_EXEC_FAILURE (0x80080005) and similar COM errors: Outlook's COM connection often breaks after sleep or a network change. Restart Outlook (Claude will ask before calling restart_outlook)

• Outlook (classic) is not running: start Outlook and try again, or let Claude do it (it will ask before calling start_outlook). Reading the calendar never starts Outlook by itself: a closed Outlook can stop at its setup screen, and the read would hang

• Outlook (classic) has no mail profile: start_outlook does not open Outlook on a PC where it has not been set up. If you do want to use it there, set it up in Outlook by hand. Only Office 2016 and later are recognized

• Outlook gave no answer: check that Outlook (classic) is running

• calendula needs WSL ...: calendula only works inside WSL on a Windows PC with Outlook

How it works

For each fetch, calendula checks with tasklist.exe that Outlook is running, then writes get_calendar.ps1 (as UTF-16 with a BOM, which Windows PowerShell 5.1 reads correctly) into a temporary directory under /tmp, and runs it hidden through wscript.exe and run_hidden.vbs, using the \\wsl.localhost\... path. The script reads the default calendar folder through Outlook.Application, including recurring events, and writes events.json, which calendula parses.

Development

uv sync
uv run pytest                                          # needs neither Windows nor Outlook
CALENDULA_WINDOWS_TESTS=1 uv run pytest                # on WSL: also the PowerShell side, still without Outlook
uv run ruff check && uv run ruff format --check

What is tested where, and why, is in docs/test-design.md; the behavior it checks is specified in docs/spec.md.

Releases: bump version in pyproject.toml, then push a tag vX.Y.Z. GitHub Actions tests, builds, publishes to TestPyPI, installs from there, publishes to PyPI (Trusted Publishing), and creates a GitHub release.

License

MIT