Every family in ParentSync gets its own private inbox address, something like your-family@inbox.parentsync.io. Anything sent there is read, organized into to-dos, events and heads-ups, and attached to the right child and activity.
You only have to set this up once. After that, school mail organizes itself.
1. Find your family inbox address
Open Connections in ParentSync. The School email section shows your family's address with a copy button. It's unique to your family — don't share it publicly, and don't reuse another family's.
2. Let Gmail send to that address
Gmail requires you to confirm a forwarding address before it will use it.
- In Gmail, open Settings → See all settings → Forwarding and POP/IMAP.
- Click Add a forwarding address, paste your ParentSync address, and confirm.
- Google emails a confirmation link and code to that address.
You don't have to dig the code out of anywhere. ParentSync watches for that confirmation message and handles it for you — the link is clicked and the code is shown on your Connections page within a minute or two. If Gmail still shows the address as unconfirmed, refresh the Gmail settings page, or copy the code from Connections and paste it into Gmail's confirmation box.
Leave "Forward a copy of incoming mail" set to off at the top of that page. You don't want your whole inbox forwarded — the filter in the next step decides what goes over.
3. Create a filter for school mail
This is the part that makes it automatic.
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In Gmail, click the filter icon in the search bar (or Settings → Filters and Blocked Addresses → Create a new filter).
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In the From field, list the senders you want captured. A good starting point:
from:(parentsquare.com OR noreply@parentsquare.com OR @yourschool.org OR @yourdistrict.org)Add the sports league, after-school program, and music teacher addresses too. Anything that sends you logistics belongs here.
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Click Create filter.
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Check Forward it to and pick your ParentSync address from the dropdown. (It only appears here once step 2 is confirmed.)
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Optionally check Never send it to Spam so nothing gets lost.
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Check Also apply filter to matching conversations to backfill the school mail already sitting in your inbox — ParentSync will process the history too.
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Click Create filter.
4. Add the senders to your allow-list
To keep junk out, ParentSync can restrict your family inbox to senders you approve.
In Connections → School email, turn on the allow-list and add the same domains and addresses you used in the Gmail filter. You can add a whole domain (parentsquare.com) or a single address. Anything not on the list is ignored.
If you'd rather accept everything that gets forwarded, leave the allow-list off.
5. Check that it's working
Within a few minutes of the next school email, you should see it on the Emails ingested page, with the to-dos and events it produced. Open one to see the source message, what was extracted, and any attachments or linked documents.
Troubleshooting
Nothing shows up. Check the Gmail filter actually matches — search Gmail with the same from: query and confirm it returns messages. Then check the allow-list in Connections isn't blocking the sender.
The email arrived but wasn't parsed. Open it on the Emails ingested page and use Re-parse. If it keeps failing, the message was probably an image-only newsletter with no readable text.
Digest emails with everything as an attachment. ParentSync opens PDFs, Google Docs and linked pages it finds in a message, so digests usually work — but each attachment it can't open is listed in the email detail so you can look at it yourself.
Multiple parents forwarding the same mail. That's fine. Duplicate messages are matched up rather than duplicated into two sets of to-dos.
Not using Gmail?
The same two steps apply everywhere: confirm your ParentSync address as a forwarding destination, then create a rule that forwards school senders to it. In Outlook it's Settings → Mail → Rules; in Apple Mail it's Settings → Rules. You can also just forward individual messages by hand any time.