Getting set up, and getting unstuck.

No. Forwarding is a convenience for getting mail in, not the product. Any of these works, and they all end in the same briefing:

• A forwarding rule — set once, and school mail arrives on its own. The walk-through covers Gmail, Outlook, and everything else.
• By hand. Forward the odd school email to your FridayFolder address whenever one arrives.
• Give the school your address. Add it to the school’s contact list or parent portal so it is copied on everything, and skip forwarding entirely.

It is not there. Neither the Gmail app nor the Outlook app has forwarding settings at all — only the full websites do, on a computer. You are not missing anything, and you have not done anything wrong.

Everything else about FridayFolder works fine on a phone. This one step needs a laptop, once, for about five minutes.

That is expected. Google will not forward anywhere until the destination proves it wants the mail, so it sends a confirmation link to your FridayFolder address — and that address has no inbox you can open.

So we catch it for you. It appears on the confirmation step of the walk-through within a few seconds, and we also email it to you. Click the link and you are done; there is usually no code to type anywhere.

Nothing after a few minutes? Click Add a forwarding address in Gmail again. Asking twice is harmless, and the links do expire.

Four things, in the order worth checking:

• Send one yourself. Find a school email already in your inbox and forward it by hand to your FridayFolder address. If it shows up in the app within a minute or two, the address is fine and the problem is the rule.
• Was the confirmation clicked? In Gmail, a forwarding address that has not been confirmed does not appear in the filter’s dropdown at all.
• Is there a filter? Adding the address is only half of it. Gmail needs a filter that says forward it to, or nothing is ever sent. That step is here.
• Work or school Microsoft 365 account? Your IT administrator may block forwarding outside the organization, and Outlook will not always say so — the rule saves and then quietly does nothing.

Still nothing, tell us and we will look at what did or did not reach us.

You set it. In the app, under Settings → When briefings arrive, you choose the time of the morning brief and the evening digest independently, turn either one off, and pick which days of the week they run.

There is also a Pause there, for a week when you would rather not hear from us at all.

Genuinely urgent things — a closure, an early dismissal — do not wait for the next briefing.

The Morning Brief is for the next few minutes. It opens with anything a parent wrote under From home, then New in the last day, The day ahead for each child, the weather, and Don’t forget to pack: the forms, fees, and things that go in the bag today.

The Evening Digest is for the end of the day. It starts with How the day went for each child, from the school’s own reports and photos, then what came in Since this morning, what is on for tomorrow and what is due, Looking ahead to the rest of the week, and your deadlines.

A note a parent writes in the app goes out once in each, then stays in the app. On a day you only take one briefing, that one carries the photos, the week, and the list as well.

Your first month is free. You can subscribe at the end of setup or any time under Settings → Your subscription, monthly or yearly.

In the iPhone or iPad app, you subscribe with your Apple ID, and Apple handles the payment. To cancel or switch plans, tap Manage in the App Store in Settings, or open the Settings app, tap your name, then Subscriptions. If you set up a new phone, Restore Purchases in Settings finds your subscription again.

On the web, you subscribe with a card through Stripe, and Manage billing in Settings is where you change or cancel it.

Either way it is one subscription for the whole household, and both parents are covered. Your mail keeps arriving and nothing is deleted if a subscription ends; the briefings start again when you subscribe.

Yes, and it is a complete way to use FridayFolder. Add them under Settings → Who gets them and they receive every briefing in their own inbox. They never have to create an account or sign in to anything.

Reading it in your inbox is the whole product. The app is there when you want to look something up, not something either of you has to visit.

Reply straight to it. A reply goes to the same address your school mail goes to, and it reaches a person.

Tell us what it said and what it should have said — a wrong date, the wrong child, a thing that should not have been there at all. That is how most of this gets fixed.

Yes. The Drop tab in the app takes a photo of a paper flyer, a screenshot of a text message, a PDF calendar, a sign-up link, or half a sentence typed in. It goes through the same reader as your mail, so it comes out with dates, a child, and a place on your list.

Forwarding anything to your FridayFolder address from anywhere does the same thing.

Settings → Who we read lists everyone we have heard from. Muting one stops new items from it, and nothing already on your list disappears.

Save FridayFolder as a contact. It tells Gmail and Outlook these are wanted mail, and it puts our logo beside them instead of a gray letter. There is a one-tap link at the bottom of every briefing and under Settings → Keep us out of spam.

Worth doing on each parent’s phone separately.

We read what arrives at your FridayFolder address, and nothing else. We are not connected to your mailbox, we cannot see the rest of your inbox, and we could not read it if we wanted to — mail reaches us only because you or your school sent it there.

Email bodies and attachments are deleted on a schedule; your list of commitments is kept until you delete it; and there is a button for erasing any of it under Settings → Account. Briefings carry no tracking pixels and no rewritten links.

The privacy page has the specifics — exactly what is stored, for exactly how long, and who else is involved. It is written in plain English and it is the authority; we deliberately do not restate its numbers here, so there is only one place for them to be right.

Settings → Account → Delete things, where there are three separate options: erase stored email content, erase your history, or remove the household entirely.

What each one covers, and the one small thing that outlives an account and why, is set out on the privacy page.