Pday LettersTerms and privacy
Last updated 12 September 2026. This one page covers both the terms of use and the privacy notice, because they answer the same question and you should only have to read one thing.
The short version
The letters are yours. We store them, render them, show them to the people you invite, and send a finished book to the printer when an owner creates a checkout page — nothing else. We do not advertise, sell or rent personal data, and there is no tracking on this site. Archive members can download a portable copy, and owners can delete an archive at any time. The one thing worth reading in full is who can see an archive, because the honest answer includes us.
Terms of use
Who runs this
Pday Letters is run by one person, not a company. The online archive is offered free, as described on the front page; printed books are an optional purchase handled by the printer. The site is maintained in its operator's spare time. Using the service means accepting what is on this page.
Your letters stay yours
The letters, the photographs and everything in them belong to the missionary and the family who wrote and received them. We claim no ownership of any of it, and we acquire no right to use it beyond running the service for you.
By sending letters to post@pdayletters.com you give us permission to do four things with them, and only these four: store them, convert them into pages and photographs an archive can display, show them to the people an owner has invited, and lay them out into a book and provide it to the printer if an owner creates a checkout page. We will not make them public, use them to train anything, or show them to an advertiser.
What you may send us
Send letters you wrote or letters you received. Forwarding a missionary's letter to their archive is the ordinary use and needs no permission from anyone. Do not send us other people's private correspondence, and do not send anything you do not have the right to keep a copy of.
An archive can be created for a missionary without their knowledge — that is deliberate, because a finished archive is a good homecoming gift. A missionary may always take ownership of their own archive, or have it deleted. See takedown and disputes.
Who you let in
An archive is private and is not listed anywhere, but it is only as private as its guest list. If you own an archive, deciding who to invite is your decision and your responsibility, and so is removing them later. Sign in with an address you control, and tell us if you think somebody has reached an archive who should not have.
A printed-book checkout is separate from the archive guest list. Once an owner creates one, signed-in archive members can open it, and anyone who receives its link can order a copy without joining the archive. The checkout expires after six months.
Acceptable use
Do not use this service to break the law, to harass anybody, or to store material that is illegal to possess. Do not try to reach an archive you were not invited to, probe the service for weaknesses, or automate against it in a way that degrades it for other families. We may suspend or delete an archive that is being used this way, and for anything clearly illegal we may do so without warning.
This is beta, and the online service is free
The beta mark is a factual statement rather than a disclaimer: parts of this service have not yet been used by many people. Features may change or be withdrawn, and the service itself may one day stop. Nothing here is a promise that it will exist forever.
The download exists for that reason. Anybody with access to an archive can download a portable copy — readable letters, saved photographs and a working reader — as a single file that opens without us and without the internet, so the archive can be preserved if the service ever has to go away. The original raw email files are retained by the service but are not included in that download.
No warranty, and the limit of our liability
The service is provided as it is, with no warranty of any kind. We have taken real care with the durability of the archive, but we cannot guarantee that it will always be available, that mail will always arrive, or that nothing will ever be lost. To the fullest extent the law allows, the person running this service is not liable for any loss arising from using it or from being unable to use it, and any liability that cannot be excluded is limited to what you paid directly to use the online service, which is nothing.
These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Washington, United States.
Privacy
What we hold
- The letters themselves — the original email exactly as it reached us, plus the readable version and the photographs we make from it.
- Email addresses and names — of the people who sent us letters, the people invited to an archive, and the people who have signed in. Signing in also gives us the name on that account, because it arrives alongside the address, and we may keep it so an archive can show who is who.
- A little about each archive — the missionary's display name, who is on the guest list and in what role, and how often each person wants to be emailed.
- Operational logs — that a message arrived, whether it was accepted, that an email was sent, and errors. Logs record senders, subject lines and outcomes. They do not record the contents of letters.
What we do not do
There is no advertising, no selling or renting of anybody's data, no profiling, and no analytics or tracking of any kind on these pages. We do not use your letters to train machine-learning models. There is nothing on this site that reports what you read, and images hosted elsewhere are stripped out of a letter rather than loaded. Photographs attached to the letter itself are unaffected.
Signing in, and cookies
You sign in with an existing Google or Microsoft account. We never see, receive or store your password. What we ask them for is the smallest thing they offer: your email address, the name on the account, and an identifier for it.
One cookie keeps you signed in. A second exists only for the few minutes it takes to bring pictures over from Google Photos, and is destroyed the moment that finishes. We may use cookies or browser storage for other things that make the site work — remembering a preference, or keeping a page usable between visits. We will never use them for advertising, and never to follow you around other websites.
Pictures from Google Photos
An owner adding pictures to a letter can take them from Google Photos rather than hunting for the files on a device. None of what follows happens unless somebody asks for it, and nothing here is on by default.
When you ask, Google shows you its own picker and you choose the pictures yourself. Your Google Photos library is never handed to us and we cannot browse it, search it or list what is in it. The only thing that comes back is the pictures you picked.
Each one is then converted and stored with the letter exactly as it would have been had you uploaded the file yourself, and from that moment it is an ordinary photograph on an ordinary letter, kept and deleted on the same terms as any other. The permission Google gives us is short-lived, is never renewed, and is thrown away as soon as the pictures are in — there is no standing connection to your Google account, and so nothing left afterwards to disconnect.
Who can see an archive
An archive is visible to the people its owners have invited, and to nobody else. It is not public, not listed, and not indexed by search engines. Letters an owner has hidden are removed before the page is built, so a hidden letter never reaches a reader's device at all.
The people who run this service can also reach any archive. Somebody has to be able to investigate a fault, settle a dispute, or delete an archive on request — but it does mean your letters are not technically private from us, and you should know that before deciding to use this. Every time an operator opens an archive they do not belong to it is recorded, reading included, and the page says so on screen while they are there.
Other companies involved
- Microsoft Azure — hosts the site and stores the archives, in the United States.
- Cloudflare — runs the domain, receives incoming letters, and sends the emails we send you.
- Google and Microsoft — to sign you in, and only the account you chose. Google also hands over pictures from Google Photos, but only the ones an owner has picked out themselves and only when they ask for it.
- Peecho — the printing company, and only if an owner creates a book checkout page. Creating one lets Peecho retrieve the book so it is ready to order; Peecho then handles payment, printing and the delivery address. We never see your payment details and never store a delivery address.
These companies act for us or, in Peecho's case, for you as the buyer. None of them is given anybody's letters to use for their own purposes.
How we protect what we hold
- Encrypted on the way here. Every connection to this site, and every connection between the site and the storage behind it, is HTTPS over TLS 1.2 or better. Nothing is served over plain HTTP.
- Encrypted where it sits. Everything we keep is encrypted at rest by Microsoft Azure — the original emails, the readable letters, and every photograph.
- Nothing is reachable by guessing a URL. Anonymous access to our storage is switched off, so there is no address that hands out a letter to whoever types it. Every request for a letter or a photograph goes through one gate that works out who you are and whether you are on that archive's guest list before it reads a single byte.
- There is no password for us to lose. The service proves who it is to its own storage with an identity Azure issues and rotates, so there is no key sitting in a configuration file. The identity it runs as from hour to hour cannot permanently delete anything; erasing is the one job given to a second identity, held apart for that purpose.
- The Google Photos permission never lands in our database. It stays in your own browser, for at most an hour, in a cookie that scripts cannot read and that only travels over HTTPS. It is signed with a key only this service holds, so nobody can forge one and point it at somebody else's archive. It is never renewed.
None of this makes a service impossible to break into, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. If we ever find that letters have been exposed, we will tell the people whose letters they are.
How long we keep things
- Letters: for as long as the archive exists. We deliberately keep the original email indefinitely, because it is the irreplaceable copy and everything else can be rebuilt from it.
- A deleted archive disappears immediately and is erased 30 days later. Deleting stops it resolving for everybody at once; the underlying data is purged for good a month afterwards. The delay is a safety net against inadvertent deletion.
- Letters for an archive nobody has claimed are deleted on their own — after 14 days of silence, or 60 days once we have had a verified letter from the missionary themselves. Nothing is ever displayed before somebody claims it.
- Operational logs: 30 days.
Your choices
- Take a copy. Anybody with access can download the entire archive at any time.
- Stop the email. Change how often you hear from us on the email settings page, or use the unsubscribe link in any message we send. Every email we send is a response to something somebody did — a letter arriving, an invitation, an archive you belong to being updated. We do not send marketing.
- Delete it. An owner can delete an archive and everything in it. If you only want yourself removed, ask an owner to take you off the guest list.
Children
This service is not directed at children, and accounts are for the adults who run and read an archive. Letters home naturally mention children, and often include photographs of them; those arrive as part of the letter, and the owners of an archive decide who gets to see them. If a child appears in an archive and you want that changed, tell us and we will act on it.
If something is wrong
Takedown and disputes
Open a takedown request and somebody will follow it up. It asks which archive you mean and what your connection to it is. Issues there are public, so keep private details out of one — say that the matter is private and we will find another way to carry it on.
If you are the missionary and an archive of your letters exists that you did not set up, you can have it. While your @missionary.org address still works, email claim@pdayletters.com from it and the service will hand it over automatically. That address stops working 60 days after you return home, so afterwards open an issue instead — the archive itself is usually the evidence, because letters sent from your own account carry proof of it that outlives the mailbox.
If you appear in somebody's letters and want something removed, tell us what and where. We will contact the archive's owners, and we can remove it ourselves if that goes nowhere.
There are two outcomes available to us, and it is better to say plainly what they are: we can add somebody as an owner of an archive, or we can delete an archive entirely. Both are recorded with a written reason. We are not in a position to settle a family disagreement, and where a request needs a decision we are not qualified to make, we will say so rather than guess.
Changes to this page
The date at the top changes whenever this page does. While the service is in beta, changes to these terms are not announced, so check here if it matters to you. Once beta ends we will email the owners of every archive when something meaningful changes — not for small corrections.
Contact
Most questions about how the service works are answered on the questions page. For anything else, including everything under takedown and disputes, open an issue and somebody will read it.