Sending an email to your future self takes five steps: write the letter, choose the delivery date, confirm your address with a 6-digit code, keep a copy of the text, and wait for the day itself. The whole thing is free, needs no account or password, and is done in one sitting. Each step is spelled out below, along with the small print worth knowing before you press send.
The five steps
- Write the letter. On the home page, type the letter into the form. It can be anything from 10 to 30,000 characters, so one honest paragraph is as welcome as a full page.
- Choose the date. Pick the day the email should be sent to you. Quick presets run from 1 day to 3 years, or you can choose any date on the calendar.
- Tick the box and enter your email. The box confirms you are 16 or older and agree to the Terms and Privacy policy. Then type the email address the letter should go to.
- Confirm with the 6-digit code. A code arrives by email and is valid for 15 minutes. After the first confirmation, the browser stays signed in for about 180 days, so later letters skip the code.
- Keep your copy and wait. Nothing is emailed when the letter is written. The success screen shows a Letter ID and the delivery time, so copy the text into your notes if you want to keep it.
What to know before you send
A few honest facts change how people use the service, so they belong before the first letter rather than after:
- A saved letter cannot be edited, redirected or cancelled. Reread once before you send.
- There are no reminders and no follow-up emails. If a date matters for a bill or an appointment, keep it on a calendar too.
- The email goes to the address you typed in. Choose one you expect to keep for the whole wait, because work and school addresses can close.
- Every delivered email carries an unsubscribe link, and a mail app's one-tap unsubscribe button does the same thing. Using either stops ALL letters still scheduled for that address, with no way back on the site. If you write a series, never tap it on a whim.
- Letters are stored as plain text, so leave out passwords and anything you would not want sitting in an inbox.
- The service is for adults and teenagers 16 and older, not for children.
How far ahead can it go?
From tomorrow up to 20 years. The quick presets cover the common distances, 1 day up to 3 years, and the calendar handles everything else. A letter for next week is a note about a specific day. A letter for a decade out is a time capsule. Both are the same three fields on the same form; only the date changes.
If the distances start to blur together, choosing the delivery date compares them properly, and planning a letter for 10 or 20 years out covers the far end of the calendar.
Tomorrow, one year, or ten years?
- Tomorrow suits a day with a known shape: the morning of a results day, the first day in a new apartment, the day after a hard appointment. Write it tonight while the feeling is fresh, and it lands that morning, between 8:00 and noon, before the day picks up speed.
- One year suits questions with real answers: did the worry fade, did the plan survive, did the new job settle. A year contains every season and every awkward anniversary once, and it is short enough that you will still recognize the person who wrote.
- Ten years suits a record of your life rather than advice about it: what the apartment looked like, what things cost, who you were trying to become. Write it with more scene-setting, because the world itself will look different.
The date is not a prediction and does not need to be perfect. It is an appointment with yourself, and any of the three distances does the job the first time. Pick the one whose question you most want answered.
What the email looks like on the day
On the date you chose, we email the letter once, between 8:00 and noon in the time zone that was recorded when you wrote. That last part matters if you move: a letter written on one coast and read on another is sent on the writing day's clock, not the new one.
The subject line carries the writing date, so you can see at a glance how far the letter traveled. Nothing else comes that day: no reminder beforehand, no follow-up afterward. The email holds the text exactly as you left it, plus the unsubscribe link described above. If you planned to reread it properly, what to do when a letter comes back to you covers the reading itself.
A one-year letter
Here is the kind of letter this article is really about, written in ten minutes at a laundromat:
Dear future me,
By the time you read this, a year will have passed since the laundromat, where I watched the dryers spin and put off a decision about the lease. The decision was whether to stay in this apartment or take the smaller one near the river and save the difference. Did the rent go up anyway? Are you by the river, or still here with the noisy radiator? Whatever you chose, check the savings total you were aiming for, not the address. If you took the river, open the windows tonight for me.
[your name]
The decision is written down before it is made, so the year from now cannot rewrite it. A year later, the reading is a conversation with the person who was still deciding.
If this is your first letter and the blank form feels large, the no-stress start gets a short one sent tonight.
Write it now
Write the letter in plain sentences and reread it once. Choose the delivery date that matches the question you are asking, and send it. When the success screen appears, copy your text and the Letter ID into your own notes.
