Creating email reminders from a calendar program ala google calendar

So I am trying to completely divest myself of all things Google. One major feature I depend on, however, is email reminders from google calendar. For some odd reason I have not found a libre program to do this (it must be out there, but I've yet to find it). For the moment I am using a calendar program called "pal" and it has the ability to send to email with the following syntax:

pal --mail -r 1 -c 0 | sendemail -f name at domain -t name at domain -u "Today's schedule" -s smtp.domain.com:587 -o tls=yes -xu myusername -xp mypassword

Explanation:

Format output so sendemail can understand it. Send me the first reminder, and don't print a calendar
pal --mail -r 1 -c0

pipe output to sendemail so I can email it to myself.
| sendemail

key to options:
-f from email -t to email -u subject line -s smtp server and port -o name/value for authentication tls=yes -xu username -xp password

This works! However, because sendemail is receiving piped input, it can't prompt for a password and I have to use a plain-text password in the above command.

I would like to set this up as a cron job, but I don't want to store a plain-text password.

One final point: The program pal says that --mail is used with sendmail. I couldn't figure out sendmail so easily, so I used sendemail instead. I don't know if sendmail could do this better?

Questions:
1.) How can I do this in a way that secures the password?
2.) Is there something simpler?
3.) Could sendmail do this better than sendemail