The daily brief

The brief is written at the time you chose (8:00 PM unless you changed it) and lands in your inbox minutes later. A Mac asleep at that moment writes it on next wake, and Porchlight also checks every hour and catches up a missed brief on its own. A Mac powered fully off misses the day’s slot; the next evening’s brief covers what it can read from history. If your Mac was offline when the brief tried to send, it’s saved on your Mac and you get a notification saying so; nothing is lost.

Yes, to do its work. Porchlight checks in every hour and writes the Daily Brief each evening, but only while your Mac is awake. A MacBook with the lid closed is asleep, even when it’s plugged in, as macOS doesn’t let apps work during sleep.

If your Mac is asleep, nothing is missed, only delayed. Everything Porchlight reads is on your Mac, so the moment it wakes, it catches up on the whole day, and the brief goes out complete. The real trade-off is timing: an urgent alert can’t reach you while your Mac sleeps. It arrives when the lid next opens.

Our recommendation: if your household has an always-on Mac (a Mac mini, an iMac, a Mac Studio desktop in the kitchen or office), install Porchlight there. For a laptop, either leave the lid open while it’s on power with “prevent automatic sleeping” turned on in System Settings → Battery, or connect an external display so it stays awake with the lid closed. And if your Mac goes quiet for more than a day, we email you, so a Mac asleep in a bag never fails silently.

Menu bar → Settings. Changes take effect from the next digest.

Yes, two ways: press “Send a brief now” on Porchlight’s home screen, or click the lamp in the menu bar and choose “Send digest now”. It writes a fresh brief covering the last 24 hours and emails it like the nightly one.

Briefs come from digest@porchlights.ai. If deliveries start failing outright, a red banner appears on your account dashboard and your Mac itself tells you, because email is exactly the channel that’s failing. The usual fixes: check the address in Settings → The Brief for a typo, add digest@porchlights.ai to your contacts, and if one landed in spam, mark it “Not spam” so your mail provider learns.

The lamp is the brief’s honest status. Unlit with a time: tonight’s brief isn’t due yet. Glowing and busy: it’s being written right now, with a live line saying which part. Bright: it left for your inbox, with the time. A low ember means something needs patience: either the brief is written but couldn’t reach your inbox yet (it retries), or the last run hit a snag and will try again on its own.

Sunday’s email is the Sunday Edition: the week on the porch, the shape of the week as a simple chart, what moved against your child’s own baseline, how every flag the week raised was resolved, and one good conversation opener that is never drawn from a safety concern. It replaces that evening’s daily brief rather than adding a second email.

The Pulse compares your child’s day against their own normal, and it refuses to guess before it has one. It appears after about five days of history and reaches full confidence at about two weeks. Until then the brief simply says it’s still learning.

A source you switched on never just disappears. A quiet day says so in words (“No calls in this window.”), and a source that couldn’t be read says that instead, which is a different sentence on purpose. If a sign-in expired, the brief carries a reconnect banner and Settings shows an amber Reconnect on the exact tile. When the cause is on another device, like Share Across Devices for Screen Time, the quiet line names it.

Fix it yourself, once, in Settings → Corrections. Type the number, email or @handle and the correct name, and every future brief honors it; mark an Instagram account as fine and its flag disappears. Corrections live on your Mac and never leave it. And at the bottom of every section in the brief there’s a small 👍/👎: a tap tells us the kind of miss without sending any content, which is how the product learns where it’s weak.