Frequently Asked Questions

InboxGrades is a service for parents and guardians of students. Once daily, InboxGrades logs into the parent web portals of childrens' schools; collects the kids' classes, assignments, and grades information; and sends a concise email with that information.

The slogan of the service is "Hassle-free oversight" and that is what we strive to provide to our customers.

Technically, InboxGrades is property of Adivvyo, Inc.

Practically speaking, as the sole proprietor of Adivvyo, Inc., Lester Hightower owns and operates InboxGrades.

In 2018, when my children were in elementary and middle school, my wife and I were blindsided by some poor grades. My son was struggling some in math and my daughter in English, and their teachers had not directly communicated that to us. The teachers were making notes in the school's parents portal, but my wife and I have busy lives and were not logging into that portal frequently to keep tabs on our kids. This was also not the first time that we had been similarly surprised and I was spurred to action by my frustration.

In my professional life, I had programmed several software robots for various tasks. I was confident that I could create one to login to our parents portal to collect the data, and then send a daily status email to my wife and me, and that is what I did. The first automated email was sent to us on March 20, 2018 and we have been "dogfooding" that software robot every day since.

My first parents portal software robot interacted with MySchoolApp.com and it served us extremely well for many years. But then, my daughter's high school switched to a parents portal provided by Veracross.com, for the 2023-2024 school year. And so, I either had to write a software robot to work with Veracross or (gasp) lose our hassle-free oversight of my daughter's school performance. Long-story short, Veracross support was added in mid August of 2023.

No longer having personal access to MySchoolApp.com, and knowing that without it being routinely exercised that my software robot's support for it would die of software rot from dormancy, I asked among friends if anyone had children in a school with a parents portal provided by MySchoolApp.com. One friend, with three children, allowed me to have their grades emailed to he and his wife each day. Their response to their new hassle-free oversight was fairly dramatic, and my friend repeatedly encouraged me to consider commercializing the capability, and that ultimately to InboxGrades.

Today, InboxGrades supports portals hosted at:

• https://<school>.myschoolapp.com
• https://portals.veracross.com/<school>
• https://<district>.edupoint.com

However, the InboxGrades software is designed to allow it to have support for other parent portals rapidly added. If you have a portal that you would like us to consider supporting, please reach out.

InboxGrades allows a total of three email addresses to receive your daily reports: the account's primary email address plus up to two additional addresses.

Each additional email address must verify its consent to receive emails from InboxGrades. That is accomplished with a consent email from which the user can consent or refuse to receive InboxGrades emails.

We do not offer any warranties or refunds.

However, we strongly support "try before you buy" and that includes insisting that users configure and fully test InboxGrades prior to buying a subscription. Even when subscriptions are purchased, they include generous free trial periods that allow users to cancel prior to their first charge and for any reason whatsoever. Users can also begin on a month-to-month plan and upgrade later, if and as they become comfortable with our service reliability.

We do not offer warranties or refunds because:

1. InboxGrades is a low-cost service operated by a single person. The time, energy, and costs of processing warranty claims or refund requests would make InboxGrades impossible to operate.
2. The upstream portals that InboxGrades interacts with change from time to time and InboxGrades must be adapted to those changes. Those adaptations can usually be made in just a few hours, but it could take up to a few days.
3. In short, InboxGrades is a best effort service with no warranties or refunds offered. Any other approach would make the service impossible to provide.

The privacy of our users is of utmost importance. InboxGrades will never use the information that you share with us in any way other than to provide our services. We will not sell your information to any third parties and we will only provide your information to third parties for the purposes of providing our services. Third parties that we share your information with will only be vendors to us, or employees or contractors working on our services.

The information that we receive from third-party login providers, such as Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc., is used only for the purpose of creating related InboxGrades user accounts and allowing users to login via their preferred login provider. We gather the least amount of data needed from those providers in order to support our user accounts and we do not share it with any third parties.

The information that we collect about students, classes, grades, etc. is used only to provide our services. We do not store that information in any databases and therefore have no way to query it. Copies of emails that contain that information, that are sent daily to our subscribers, will stay on our servers for a period of time for the purpose of customer support and troubleshooting, but they will not be retained long term.

Most noteworthy are Clerk, Stripe, Vultr and Zoho.

• Clerk is a reputable user management and user authentication provider and InboxGrades uses those services from them.
• Stripe is used by millions of companies of all sizes to accept payments and InboxGrades uses Stripe for subscriptions management and payments.
• Vultr is a premier provider of highly reliable and high performance cloud compute environments. This website and the operational parts of the InboxGrades service are hosted there.
• Zoho offers a wide range of technology solutions and, as of November 2022, it is used more than 50,000 organizations and 80 millions users. InboxGrades uses the Zoho Mail service to send emails to customers.

The cybersecurity of our systems and the related protection of our users' information is of utmost importance and, therefore, InboxGrades follows the related industry best practices.

Information sent to and received from our website moves over the Internet via the Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS), which is an encrypted transport mechanism used by almost all websites today, ranging from Google to banks.

The user credentials provided to InboxGrades, that allow us access to parents portals, is all encrypted when stored on our servers. For that encryption, we employ the National Security Agency (NSA) certified Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) standard.

Our email vendor encrypts all email transmissions with TLS encryption when the receiving email server supports it, and most do.

For most InboxGrades users, it probably makes the most sense to establish your account with one of the social account "Continue with..." options, as doing so will not create an additional password to remember or store.

If you do choose to use password login, then the most important thing that you can do is to use a unique password when you create your InboxGrades account, and that is true of every website that you interact with. Then, a breach of one website cannot jeopardize your account on another. Sharing passwords among various systems and sites is the number one reason that people are victims of wide-scale cybercrime.

It is also important to use strong passwords.

To address both unique and strong passwords, we strongly advise that you a password manager. This Password Manager Primer is a good place to start.

The only user data that InboxGrades stores is the portal login credentials used to send daily performance report emails. To delete those data, navigate to the "Settings" page, click the "Edit" button, and then click the "Delete" button.