Questions

If the answer you need is not here, the code for this site is on GitHub — open an issue and somebody will follow up.

General

What is this?

Missionary letters arrive by email, scatter across inboxes, and are gone by the time anyone wants to read them again. This keeps them together: forward a letter to post@pdayletters.com and it is filed, with its photos saved alongside it, in one private archive the family can read.

Archives are not public, are not listed anywhere, and are not indexed by search engines. See getting started for the first few minutes of it.

Can I get the letters back out?

Yes. Anyone with access can download a portable zip containing the readable letters, saved photos and an offline reader. It does not include the original raw email files. Nothing here is a one-way door.

Setting up

I forwarded a letter and nothing happened.

Usually this means your mail program quoted the letter as text instead of attaching it. Try again using Forward as attachment — the exact menu item for each program is on the getting started page.

If you already attached it and it still did not work, see the next question. That one is not something you did.

If you are on a phone, you may not find that menu item at all — the Outlook and Gmail phone apps do not offer it. The email we send back carries a link for that case: open it and we will ask your missionary to send you a link of their own, which sets the archive up when you open it.

We write back once for each of those two problems, and only once, so that forwarding a stack of old letters does not produce a stack of replies.

I attached the letter and it still says it cannot be verified.

This is a known problem with the classic Outlook app on Windows and the Outlook app on Android, and it is not something you have done wrong. Those apps do not send on the letter they received — they rebuild it from their own copy. The rebuilt letter says the same words, but it no longer carries the proof that the missionary wrote it, and that proof is the only thing standing between an archive and anyone who fancies inventing a letter.

To start an archive, we need one letter that still has it. Two ways to get one:

Forward it from Outlook on the web. Open outlook.com in a browser, find the letter, and use More actions (…) > Forward as attachment. Outlook on the web keeps the part we need, so this works, and the new Outlook for Windows is the same program and works just as well. It is the same mailbox — you do not need a different account.

Or let us ask the missionary. The email we send you carries a link. Open it, and we send them one short note containing a link of their own, asking them to forward it to you and saying who asked. When it reaches you, opening it sets the archive up under your account. After that your letters go through from any mail program — including the one that would not work before.

We only offer that second because it spends a few of their minutes, and they do not have many. All they have to do is forward a message; there is nothing for them to attach and nothing to sign in to.

This only affects the very first letter. Once the archive exists, forwards from anyone you have invited go straight in, whatever they are using.

I'm a missionary and someone else set up my archive. How do I take control?

Email claim@pdayletters.com from your @missionary.org address. Anything in the subject and body — the message itself is the proof. We reply with a link; follow it and sign in with a personal account.

That makes you an owner of the archive, marked as the verified missionary. You can read, edit and delete any letter in it, and nobody can remove you or take your ownership away.

If somebody set the archive up who should not have it, open People and remove them. An owner can remove anyone except themselves, and the verified missionary is the one person no owner can remove — so once you have claimed it, the archive is yours to control.

Can the missionary sign in with their mission account?

No. @missionary.org accounts are managed by the Church and cannot be used to sign in here. Use a personal account — which is the right one anyway, since the mission account goes away at the end of the mission and the archive is meant to outlast it.

The mission account is still how a missionary proves who they are: it is the address they send to claim@pdayletters.com from. Proving and signing in are two different things here.

Why does the claim link expire?

Because it is a key. Anyone holding the link can set the archive up, so it is deliberately short-lived and stops working once it has been used. If yours has expired, send another letter to post@pdayletters.com and a fresh one follows.

Reading

How do I find a particular letter?

Search. The box at the top of the archive stays put as you scroll, and it searches every letter at once — type a name, a place, or half a sentence you remember. Letters that do not match fold away, the words that do match are highlighted where they sit, and the arrows beside the box step you from one to the next.

The keyboard does the same thing, which is quicker once you know it. From the search box, Enter or the down arrow goes to the next match and the up arrow to the one before. Escape leaves the search from anywhere on the page and puts the archive back the way it was.

What is the word cloud for?

For when you do not know what to search for. Word cloud in the archive toolbar shows the sixty words the letters come back to most often — the names, the places, the things that fill a mission — sized by how often they appear. Pick one and it runs the search for you.

The counting happens in your own browser, the first time you open it. Nothing about the letters is sent anywhere to make it, which is the same promise search already makes.

Can I fix something in a letter?

An owner can. Press Edit on the letter and the subject and the words become editable where they sit — useful for a mangled subject line, or for taking out a name or an address that should not be on a page other people can read.

The letter as it arrived is never overwritten, so an edit is not a one-way door: Restore original appears once a letter has been changed and puts it back exactly as it came. That also discards any photographs an owner added, and it asks before it does.

Can I add photographs to a letter?

Yes, an owner can, with Add pictures on the letter. It exists mostly for the letters that link out to a shared album instead of attaching anything — those links stop working the moment somebody moves or deletes the album, and pulling the photographs in here is what saves them before that happens.

Added photographs go through exactly the same treatment as ones that arrived by email, location data and all removed, and they appear at the end of that letter’s pictures. They are also in the book and in the download.

Access

Who can read an archive?

Only the people an owner has added. Archives are not public, are not listed anywhere, and are not indexed by search engines.

How do I add the rest of the family?

Open the archive, choose People, and enter their email addresses — one, or a whole list pasted in at once. We send each of them a link; nothing changes until they follow it. There is a limit of twenty invitations per archive per day, which is more than most families need in one sitting.

The address you type is only where the invitation is sent. Whichever account they actually sign in with is the one that gets access — which matters more often than you would think, because the address a family has used for somebody for twenty years is frequently not the account they sign in to things with. Once they accept, the list shows both.

Somebody I invited never got the email.

Ask them to look in their spam folder first; an invitation is a message from a domain they have never heard of, which is exactly what spam filters are for. If it is not there, open People and press Resend next to their name.

Resending sends a fresh link and stops the earlier one working, so if they later find both emails, only the newer link will do anything. It counts toward the twenty invitations a day, and we will not send to anyone who has asked us to stop emailing them.

What is the difference between a reader and an owner?

A reader can read the letters and download them. An owner can do that, and also edit or delete letters, invite other people, and remove them.

Owners can promote and remove each other. Nobody can remove or demote themselves, which is what stops an archive from ending up with no owner at all.

Privacy

Will you email me when a new letter arrives?

Only if you ask. Nobody is signed up by default, and nothing on the way in turns it on — an invitation, a claim and a first sign-in all leave it off. Open Email settings from the account menu and choose weekly or monthly. For weekly emails, choose the weekday. For monthly emails, choose the first, second, third or fourth occurrence of a weekday.

One email covers every archive you can read, so following two missionaries does not mean twice the mail, and nothing is sent in a cycle with nothing in it. There is no “no new letters” email: it would arrive most reliably during exactly the quiet stretch a family is already uneasy about.

What arrives is a summary and a link, not the letters themselves — a line or two from each and a count of the photographs, which stay behind the archive’s front door rather than being sent to an inbox. Letters an owner has hidden are left out, and the clock starts the day you choose, so a new reader’s first email is not the whole back catalogue.

Does the missionary get emails from you?

Only if their archive does not exist yet. Once it has been set up, their letters are simply filed and they never hear from us — which is the point of a parent setting it up first.

I was invited and I do not want any emails from you.

Every invitation has a link at the bottom that stops all of our email to that address, and it works without signing in or replying. After that, nobody can invite that address to any archive — whoever tries is told it has asked not to be emailed, and nothing else about it is shared with them.

It does not remove anyone from an archive they already have access to. If you have been reading a missionary’s letters, you still can; you just will not be emailed about it.

You can take it back whenever you like. Sign in with that address, open Email settings from the account menu, and choose Start emailing me again. Signing in is the proof — without it, undoing an unsubscribe would be something a stranger could do to you. Lifting the block does not start any email by itself; it only makes the choices above it possible again.

What happens to letters nobody claims?

They are held, unpublished and unreadable, and then deleted: sixty days if the missionary sent them to us themselves, fourteen if somebody forwarded them. Every new letter that arrives pushes the date back.

How do I delete an archive?

An owner can, from Settings in the archive menu. It is at the bottom of the page, behind a heading you have to open, and it asks you to type the archive’s name before the button will work.

It removes every letter, every photo, and everyone’s access to them. The archive stops being visible to you and to everyone you invited straight away, and thirty days later it is erased from storage for good. Nobody is emailed about it.

If you want a copy of the letters first, use Download my letters on the archive before you delete it. Afterwards there is nothing to download.

Printing

Can we get the letters as a book?

Yes. An owner can build one at any time, from Print a book in the archive menu — though most families wait until the missionary is home and the archive is complete. It gathers every letter in order, with the photographs, and lays them out as a hardcover: a title page, a word cloud of the mission, a contents listing each month with its letters underneath, and then a page opening every month before its letters begin. Letters you have hidden are left out.

You choose the color of the cloth and a picture for the cover if you want one, then make the book and read the whole thing on screen before anybody pays for anything. When you are happy with it, one more button turns it into a checkout page.

The checkout remains active for six months. While it is active, signed-in archive members see a Buy a Book button, and an owner can also share the checkout link with friends and family. Anyone who has the link can order a copy without an account here.

How do I buy a book?

Once an owner has created an active checkout, every signed-in archive member sees a green Buy a Book button beside Word Cloud. Press it, review the notice, and choose Continue to open the printer's checkout page.

If the button is not there, the archive does not currently have an active checkout. Ask an owner to create one. An owner can also share the printer's checkout link with somebody who does not have an archive account.

Whose book is it?

The missionary's and the family's. The letters belong to whoever wrote them and the photographs to whoever took them, and nothing about putting them in a book changes that. We claim no ownership of anything in an archive. A book becomes available only after an owner creates its checkout page, but anyone who receives that checkout link can order a copy.

That does mean something is being asked of you. When you make a checkout page, you are telling us the book is yours to print: that the letters and the photographs are your own rather than somebody else's work, and that the people in them are happy to appear in a book that gets mailed to somebody's house. We do not review archive contents to make either determination, so the assurance has to come from you.

If you are not sure about a particular photograph, the simplest answer is to remove it, or to hide that letter before you build the book. Hidden letters are never printed.

Who prints it, and who is paid?

A printing company called Peecho, who take the payment, print the book and ship it to you. The price, the postage and the taxes all go to them. We never see the payment method or the delivery address. We are told only that an order happened, and later that it shipped.

A small margin on each book comes back to us, and it is the only money this site makes. Reading an archive is free and we mean to keep it that way.

Getting started · Who Made This?