--- title: "What's New in Remindlo: August 2026" slug: "product-changelog-august-2026" type: "help-article" canonical: "https://www.remindlo.co.uk/help/product-changelog-august-2026" category: "Features" read_time: "7 min read" published_at: "2026-08-26T17:03:00+00:00" updated_at: "2026-08-26T18:46:30.338203+00:00" keywords: ["remindlo changelog", "remindlo product updates", "remindlo august 2026", "outlook calendar sms reminders", "email only contacts", "sms limit warning", "csv import contacts", "direct debit yearly plan", "calendar sync reliability"] --- # What's New in Remindlo: August 2026 > Recent product updates in Remindlo, including a dedicated Outlook Calendar page, email campaigns for contacts without a phone number, reminders that can never be sent twice, SMS limit warnings that name the reminders at risk, a smarter CSV import, and five new industry pages. August was a reliability month. Most of the work went into the parts of Remindlo you only notice when they go wrong: making sure a reminder is sent exactly once, keeping calendar feeds in step without hammering them, and telling you clearly which reminders are at risk before your SMS allowance runs out. Alongside that we closed a real gap for email campaigns, made the contact CSV importer far more forgiving about spreadsheet column names, and added five new industry pages plus a dedicated landing page for Outlook and Microsoft 365 users. ## **Outlook and Microsoft 365 Get Their Own Page** There is now a product page for the [Outlook calendar SMS integration](https://www.remindlo.co.uk/integrations/outlook-calendar). Until now, the only destination for Outlook users was a long [three-method setup walkthrough](https://www.remindlo.co.uk/blog/automate-appointment-reminders-outlook-calendar) on the blog. That is the right page when you are comparing setup routes and the wrong one when you are still deciding whether Remindlo is for you. The new page sits alongside the [Google Calendar](https://www.remindlo.co.uk/integrations/google-calendar/overview) page and answers the product question first: Outlook reminds you about the appointment, Remindlo reminds your client. It is honest about the limits, too. Sync runs hourly rather than in real time, there is no add-in to install, and if your IT admin has disabled calendar publishing there is a [Zapier](https://www.remindlo.co.uk/integrations/zapier) route instead. The step-by-step instructions still live in the blog post and the help centre, which the page links to. ## **Email Campaigns Now Reach Contacts Without a Phone Number** This one was a genuine bug, and it was quiet. When a contact was enrolled into a campaign, Remindlo checked for a mobile number before it checked what the campaign actually sends. So a **contact with an email address but no phone number** was silently dropped from an **email-only campaign**, and because no enrolment record was ever written, nothing downstream could rescue them. Enrolment now looks at the campaign's channels first and only then asks whether the contact is reachable on those channels. An email-only campaign accepts a contact with an email address. An SMS campaign still needs a mobile number. A **campaign that sends both accepts either**. Existing accounts have been backfilled, so contacts that were skipped for this reason before are now enrolled where they should be. If you run email campaigns off calendar sync, expect to see more contacts in them than last month. Related to this, the calendar sync settings now list every running campaign rather than only the SMS ones, and show each campaign's channels next to its name. Previously an email-only campaign was invisible in that list, and the "nothing selected" warning could appear on a workspace that was in fact auto-enrolling correctly. ## **Every Reminder Sends Exactly Once** Several parts of Remindlo can queue a message and ask the sender to deliver it: scheduled campaigns, the retry job, the API, and the conversation view in your dashboard. Under the right timing, two of them could pick up the same queued message. Each message is now claimed before it is sent. The first invocation to claim it sends it, and any other invocation that arrives for the same message steps aside cleanly instead of sending a duplicate or marking the message as failed. The retry job was also moved off the same schedule as campaign processing so the two are less likely to collide in the first place. **The same protection was applied to the SMS usage notification emails**, so two background runs can no longer both email you about the same threshold. ## **SMS Limit Warnings Now Tell You What Is At Risk** The notifications you get about your SMS allowance used to tell you the number. They now tell you the consequence. When your allowance is running low or has run out, the email names how many reminders are queued and at risk of not going out, and gives examples of which customers they are for. If a message was rejected because the allowance was exhausted, the notification identifies it rather than leaving you to work out what did not arrive. The wording also adapts to your situation, so a free account and a paid account approaching a top-up get different advice about what to do next. ![Email Alert About Sms Not Being Sent](https://www.remindlo.co.uk/media/email-alert-about-sms-not-being-sent-1787236979193-1787762993114.webp "Email Alert About Sms Not Being Sent") ## **Steadier Calendar Syncing** Universal Calendar (ICS) feeds got a round of work aimed at both reliability and being a better citizen to the calendar providers we poll. - **Adaptive polling.** A feed that keeps coming back unchanged moves from hourly to two-hourly checks, and picks up the pace again as soon as something changes. Polling now runs in small batches every ten minutes rather than all feeds at once on the hour, so requests are spread out instead of arriving in a burst. - **Backing off properly after an error.** Failing feeds retry with increasing gaps rather than in lockstep, and when a provider tells us to wait a specific amount of time, Remindlo now honours that. - **Better failure emails.** If a calendar connection genuinely needs your attention, the alert is clearer about which feed is affected and what the problem is, and it holds off longer before bothering you about a blip. If your reminders run off an [Outlook](https://www.remindlo.co.uk/integrations/outlook-calendar), [iCloud](https://www.remindlo.co.uk/help/icloud-calendar-sms-reminders), or other [ICS calendar,](https://www.remindlo.co.uk/help/calendar-sms-reminders) the practical effect is fewer spurious sync errors and fewer missed updates. ## **A More Forgiving CSV Import** Importing contacts from a spreadsheet no longer depends on getting the column headings exactly right. The importer now recognises a wide range of common variations for each field, so headings such as "Mobile", "Phone number", "Surname" or "Consent to receive messages" are matched to the right column without you renaming anything first. Parsing was also hardened for the awkward cases spreadsheets produce: quoted values containing commas, line breaks inside a cell, and stray formatting characters. ![Import Contacts To Remindlo And Send Sms Campaigns](https://www.remindlo.co.uk/media/import-contacts-to-remindlo-and-send-sms-campaigns-1787763311029.webp "Import Contacts To Remindlo And Send Sms Campaigns") [Recurring contacts](https://www.remindlo.co.uk/features/recurring-reminders) are now validated on the way in as well. If a contact is marked as a recurring service, Remindlo checks that both the interval value and the interval unit are present rather than accepting a half-configured record that would never advance. ## **Message Template Improvements** Three changes to templates this month: - `{{last_service_at_date}}` **is now usable in the editor.** The variable that inserts a customer's last visit date has worked in sent messages since lifecycle campaigns launched, but the template editor rejected it as unsupported, so it could not actually be typed into a template. It is now offered and documented, with the caveat that it only has a value for contacts whose last visit is on record, which makes it an after-visit variable rather than a pre-visit one. - **Optional wording no longer leaves gaps.** When a template refers to a detail you have not filled in, such as a booking link or a phone number, the surrounding clause is now removed cleanly instead of leaving an awkward fragment in the message. - **Clearer calls to action in the seeded templates.** The review request templates in particular were rewritten to be explicit about what you would like the customer to do, and to stay within Google's review policy. ## **Two New Help Articles** Two guides were added to the help centre and linked from the onboarding emails: - [**How to set up campaigns**](https://www.remindlo.co.uk/help/how-to-set-up-campaigns), covering campaign types, timing, and who gets enrolled. - [**How to write message templates**](https://www.remindlo.co.uk/help/how-to-write-message-templates), covering variables, length, and what makes a reminder get acted on. The onboarding emails themselves were rebuilt around this. Day one now leads with what you can actually do with Remindlo rather than a setup checklist, day three is built around what makes a message work, and day five adapts to your account: if you have no contacts, nothing scheduled, or reminders already queued, you get a different and relevant message rather than the same generic nudge. ## **Direct Debit Is a Yearly Plan Benefit** **Bacs Direct Debit is available at checkout on yearly plans**, paid in pounds from a UK bank account, alongside card. Monthly plans are card only. A bank debit takes a few working days to clear, and that wait is worth it once a year rather than every month. Either way your account is activated as soon as you complete checkout, so a clearing payment never delays your reminders. The [pricing page](https://www.remindlo.co.uk/pricing) and FAQ now say this plainly as well. ## **Five New Industry Pages** We added dedicated pages for [**physiotherapy clinics**](https://www.remindlo.co.uk/industries/physiotherapy), [**gardeners and landscapers**](https://www.remindlo.co.uk/industries/gardeners), [**cleaning businesses**](https://www.remindlo.co.uk/industries/cleaning), [**mobility scooter and wheelchair services**](https://www.remindlo.co.uk/industries/mobility-scooters), and [**hearing care providers**](https://www.remindlo.co.uk/industries/hearing-care), each with the reminder patterns that actually fit that trade. The auto service page was expanded to cover a much wider range of vehicle types and service intervals, and there is now a single [**Industries**](https://www.remindlo.co.uk/industries) index page that lists every sector we cover, so you no longer have to find these through the footer. ## **Articles Are Easier to Read** Blog posts and help articles now have a sticky table of contents on wider screens, so you can see the structure of a long article and jump between sections without scrolling back to the top. Longer articles also carry an in-line sign-up prompt at a natural break rather than only at the end. Article images were reworked for speed: images are now served in a modern compressed format, and every image reserves its space before it loads, so the text stops jumping around as the page comes in. ## **For Developers and AI Agents** Three additions for anyone integrating with Remindlo or pointing an AI assistant at it: - `/openapi.json` is a full machine-readable description of the public REST API, including every webhook event payload, and it is now checked against the real routes automatically so it cannot quietly go stale. - `/pricing.md` is a plain-text version of the pricing page, generated from the same source as the page itself, so an assistant comparing plans does not have to parse rendered HTML. - **Unknown URLs now return a proper 404** rather than the app shell with a 200 status. Crawlers and agents were previously told that every typo was a real page. ## **Smaller Improvements** - The pricing page now shows a compact feature list on mobile with an option to expand the full list, instead of a wall of text. - [Google Workspace Marketplace](https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/free_sms_reminders_for_google_calendar_r/108443427628) reviews are shown as social proof on the site and included in the structured data, so ratings can appear in search results. - A new [**MOT reminder software buyer's checklist**](https://www.remindlo.co.uk/blog/choosing-mot-reminder-software-questions-to-ask), published as an article and a printable PDF, covering the twelve questions worth asking any supplier before you buy. - Two-way SMS is described more precisely in the feature pages and product documentation. ## **What This Means for Users** If you send email reminders, the enrolment fix is the change to look at first, because contacts that were previously being dropped are now included. If you run reminders off a calendar feed, syncing should be noticeably steadier this month, with fewer false alarms and fewer missed updates. And if you have ever been surprised by running out of SMS, the new warnings should give you a much earlier and much more concrete heads-up, naming the reminders that will not go out rather than just the number left. ## Our previous changelogs [July 2026](https://www.remindlo.co.uk/help/product-changelog-july-2026) [June 2026](https://www.remindlo.co.uk/help/product-changelog-june-2026) [May 2026](https://www.remindlo.co.uk/help/product-changelog-may-2026) [April 2026](https://www.remindlo.co.uk/help/product-changelog-april-2026) --- Canonical URL: https://www.remindlo.co.uk/help/product-changelog-august-2026