Turn a school portal into a nightly email digest

Lisa Mollica set Claude Cowork to open their kid's school portal every night at nine and email one update, with the most important change in the subject line.

Done with

Claude Cowork

Apps touched

Gmail

ReportedOct 16, 2026

What they did

The author rarely checked their child's school portal and only looked once something had gone wrong. They made a Cowork project in the Claude desktop app, connected a folder where Claude could keep notes about the portal between runs, and authorised the Gmail connector to send mail. They logged into the portal themselves in the app's browser pane so the session would carry into later runs. Their prompt had Claude explore what the portal exposes (grades per course, assignment scores, category averages, unscored work, the calendar, alerts), draft a sample email from the real data for their approval, and then set itself up as a scheduled task that runs nightly at nine and compares against what it saw the night before.

How it went

The emails arrive with subject lines such as a low classwork score plus an exam tomorrow. On the first run it found something they would have missed: an 86 overall in Biology that sat on top of a 64 classwork average, with labs at 95. Quiet nights get a subject saying nothing is new, which they delete unread. They say the exploration step mattered most, since they had not known the portal tracked category averages or listed unscored work.

Worth knowing

Claude does not type the portal password; you log in yourself, and that browser session expires after about two weeks. Tell it to email you when it hits the sign-in page instead of sending a fake update, so a silent night is not mistaken for good news. The post is written as a shareable prompt, so the outcome is one parent's report.

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6 parts to fill in

Set up a nightly email about [my kid's name]'s school portal at [portal URL], sent to [my email] at [time] every day. Open the portal in your browser pane and wait while I log in myself; never ask for my password. Explore what the portal actually shows: grades per course, assignment scores with dates, category averages, assignments with no score yet, the calendar and any alerts. Then draft a sample email from the real data and show it to me before sending anything. Put the single most important item in the subject line, in this order: a score below [threshold], a dropped course average, missing work, a test tomorrow, a school alert. Lead with what changed since the last check. When I approve, schedule it, save what you need in [project folder] to compare with yesterday, and if you hit the login screen email me a short note instead of an update.

Square brackets are the parts to fill in. The prompt is ours; the story is theirs.