Reminders

A reminder is an absolute date and time attached to a task. When it comes due, Conatus emails you and raises the bell in the sidebar.

Adding one

Open a task and use the + in the Reminders rail row, or Reminders on a row’s ⋯ menu. Pick a date and time; the reminder is stored as an exact instant.

A task can carry any number. Deleting the task deletes its reminders. Reminders on deleted tasks or in deleted projects are never sent.

Relative reminders (“30 minutes before due”) and location reminders do not exist. Absolute datetimes only.

The bell

The bell in the sidebar header shows reminders that have come due and that you have not dismissed yet. Dismissing one marks it seen; it does not touch the task.

The bell works with no email configuration at all. It is the only reminder channel an instance without SMTP has.

Email delivery

Email requires SMTP

Reminder emails are sent only when SMTP_HOST, SMTP_PORT and SMTP_FROM are all set. Without all three, the mailer is disabled and the delivery worker returns immediately. Reminders still appear in the bell, but nothing is sent.

In .env:

SMTP_HOST=mail.example.com
SMTP_PORT=587
SMTP_FROM="Conatus <conatus@example.com>"

A reminder email carries the task name as its subject, and the name, the due date and the project in the body.

Delivery also needs an email address on your account. An account registered with just a username has none until you add one, and reminders for an account with no address are skipped.

How the worker runs

A job inside the app container polls every minute for reminders that are due and not yet sent. It is a poll rather than one scheduled job per reminder, which means:

• editing or deleting a reminder needs no job bookkeeping;
• a missed minute catches up on the next tick rather than being lost;
• a reminder can fire up to a minute late, never early.

If a send fails the reminder is left unsent, so the next tick retries it. One failure never blocks the rest of the batch, and failures are reported through ERROR_WEBHOOK_URL if you have configured one.

Through the API

Reminders are first-class in the v1 API and in MCP:

curl -X POST https://tasks.example.com/api/v1/reminders \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer tdm_..." \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"taskId":"…","remindAt":"2026-03-04T08:00:00Z"}'

Scopes: reminders:read, reminders:write, reminders:delete. See REST API.

Related

If what you want is your tasks in a calendar app rather than an email, use the calendar feed instead.