The weekly letter
Every letter home, kept in their own words
One private address goes in the weekly email your missionary already writes. Every letter files itself by mission week, photos beside it, and waits for the printed book.
Letters
Right now the letters live in an inbox, scattered between P-days, in an account the Church will delete within months of release. The words that told you who they were becoming deserve a safer place than a search bar.
- One private capture address per missionary. Your missionary adds it to the weekly email once, or you set your own inbox to forward to it automatically. The same letter arriving twice down the same route is matched on its text and stored once.
- A forwarded letter keeps its original date, not the day you forwarded it, and is filed to the mission week it belongs to.
- Photos attached to a letter are saved with it and shown beside it when you open the letter.
- Letters you write are delivered on to your missionary and kept as the other side of the story, never mixed into their biography.
- Followers get the whole letter by email with no account. Every email carries one-click unsubscribe, and you can see and remove anyone on the list.
How it works
Give them one address
Your archive mints a private capture address, shown on your dashboard and sent to your missionary in their welcome email. They add it to the weekly email they already write, To, CC or BCC. Or you set your own inbox to forward automatically to it.
The letter files itself
It lands in the archive filed to its mission week, counted from their start date. A forwarded letter keeps its original date. Photos are saved beside it.
Everyone who loves them reads it
Family members get a tap on the phone or an email with the opening lines and a link to the whole letter. Anyone on your follow link receives the whole letter, with the first photos that came with it, by email, no account needed.
On the printed page
What ends up in the book
- Their letters, printed word for word inside the chapter for the area they were serving in when they wrote them, each with its date and subject line, under the heading "The letters from [area]".
- The chapter narrative itself is written from these letters, with the verbatim letters following it as the record behind the story.
- Letters from Home, an appendix bound into the final volume holding what the family wrote back, dated. You choose all of them, first-words excerpts, a digest condensed by the biographer, or none.
- Photos that arrived with a letter, filed by their own capture date into that area, ready to be chosen for the chapter's gallery.
Questions
- Does my missionary have to do anything new?
- One thing, once: put the capture address in the weekly email they already send, To, CC or BCC. If they would rather not, set your own Gmail to forward automatically to that address. Google mails us a confirmation code and we pass it straight to you.
- They have been out a year already. Is it too late?
- No. Archive Rescue takes the Gmail label holding their letters, exported through Google Takeout as an .mbox file. Each letter is filed by its original date, photos extracted, duplicates merged; with the sender filter on, only their mail is kept. The uploaded file is deleted when the rescue finishes. Or paste a few by hand.
- What happens when the Church deletes their email account?
- It will, within months of release. The letters they sent home also live in your inbox and in this archive. Letters, chats, transcripts and the book stay readable, free, forever. Photos, audio and video stay live through the mission and six months after; unvaulted, they may move to sealed, restorable storage.
- Who else can read the letters?
- The family members you invite, and anyone you hand the follow link, who receives each letter by email without an account. Every one of those emails has a one-click unsubscribe, and the Family page shows you who is following so you can remove anyone. Letters the family writes stay with the correspondence, outside the biography.
Every letter home, kept in their own words
Begin the archiveEverything else it keeps
