⚙ Blueprint
School Email Digest
Never miss a permission slip, payment or deadline buried in school emails again.
- Goal
- Never miss a permission slip, payment or deadline buried in school emails again.
- Runs
- ⏱ Every Sunday at 6:00am
- Watches
- 👁 Emails with your 'School' label (set up a filter first)
What it does, step by step
- In your email, make a filter that puts a 'School' label on everything from the school.
- The bot reads labeled emails it hasn't processed yet, including newsletter links.
- Pulls out deadlines, forms, payments and events for YOUR kids only.
- Sends a digest, urgent first, and labels each email 'Processed'.
Paste these starter instructions
Copy, paste into your tool, and replace the [brackets] with your details.
You are my School Email Digest bot. Every Sunday at 6:00am, find emails labeled 'School' that are NOT labeled 'Processed'. Open any newsletter links inside them. My kids: [initials], [grade], [school]. Ignore anything for other grades or for [activities we don't do]. Make a digest with these sections: 1) Closures and schedule changes, 2) Deadlines this week and next (forms, payments, sign-ups), 3) Events to put on the calendar, 4) Anything asking for a reply. Remove duplicates. Put the date first on every line. When done, add the label 'Processed' to each email you read. Rules: draft replies to teachers but never send them. Don't share my kids' details anywhere else.
Which tool to use
- agentClaude CoworkGmail connector + scheduled task (step-by-step guide in sources)Check plan requirements on Anthropic's help page
- agentGemini SparkGoogle's own example: school updates digestGoogle AI Pro and Ultra subscribers in select countries
- agentGrok Bot (personal agents)Daily or weekly routineCheck plan requirements in xAI's docs
- agentMeta MuseAsk it to watch school emailsFree with a usage limit; paid tier for more
What this costs to run
If you run this bot yourself on an AI API: our assumption is 4 runs a month, each reading about 20,000 tokens and writing about 1,000 (a week of school email (about 40 messages) read once a week). That's about 80,000 tokens in and 4,000 out a month.
| Model | Price per 1M tokens (in / out) | About per month |
|---|---|---|
| Anthropic Claude Haiku 5.5 | $0.10 / $0.50 | $0.01 |
| Google gemini-3.8-flash | $0.75 / $3.75 | $0.07 |
| Anthropic Claude Sonnet 5.5 | $2.00 / $10.00 | $0.20 |
| OpenAI gpt-6-astra | $10.00 / $50.00 | $1.00 |
Token counts are our editor's estimates, not measurements. Real use can be several times higher if the agent browses the web or uses tools: Anthropic says its browser toolset alone adds about 6,600 input tokens per request.
Try other models and numbers in the cost calculator →
Prices are standard API rates from each provider's official pricing page, checked Oct 21, 2026 (full price table). If you use an app plan (Grok Bot, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Meta Muse) the bot runs inside your plan's limits instead of being billed per token. How to run your bots for less →
How to set it up
- Pick one boring job. Choose ONE small job you do every week, like reading school emails or checking a web page.
- Pick your tool. Use what you already have.
- Paste the instructions and fill in the [brackets]. Open a new chat in the tool.
- Say “Run this once now and show me the result”. Don't schedule anything yet.
- Then say “Do this every [day/time]” and lock it down. Once the result looks right, ask it to repeat on a schedule.
Safety notes
- Use initials, not names, if you prefer.
- Drafts only for anything going to the school.
- Check the first two digests against the original emails.