About half a dozen companies will turn your missionary's weekly emails into a bound book, and their websites are almost interchangeable. The same photograph of a hardcover on a kitchen table. The same three steps.
They are not interchangeable. They differ in what they keep, what they cost once your real page count is in front of you, and whether anything happens at all while your missionary is still out.
Below is each one: what it preserves, what it costs read off its own page, and who it suits. Where a competitor is the better buy, that is what it says. Every price here was read from the company's own page on 26 August 2026. They move, so check before you pay.
The question that sorts the whole category
Two different products are wearing the same name.
A print job. You gather the emails at some point, usually near the end, and a company lays them out and prints them. Nothing happens while your missionary serves. The letters were already yours; the service turns them into an object.
An archive. Something runs for the whole mission and catches things as they arrive that would otherwise not survive it.
Most of this market is the first kind, and for a great many families that is exactly the right purchase. If you want the letters bound cheaply, you are shopping on price and page count.
Before you buy anything
Every letter your missionary sent home is already sitting in your inbox. That copy is yours, and no company gave it to you.
What is on a clock is what lives only inside their missionary.org account: their Google Photos, their Drive, their contacts, their sent mail. That account stops opening sometime after they come home, and is then deleted. The day counts that circulate online are reported rather than published policy, and nobody, this page included, can tell you your date. The free steps are written out here.
One rule applies to every service here, and to us. None of them needs your missionary's password, and none should ask for one. Most work off an address that letters are copied to, which touches no account at all. One, Missionary Mailbag, asks instead to connect a Gmail account through Google's own sign-in screen; if you use it, connect the inbox that already holds the letters, which is usually yours, and never type a password anywhere but on Google's own page. If anyone asks for a password or a verification code, close the tab. Where an account action genuinely needs doing, your missionary does it — sit beside them, or join a screen share. The code Google texts is the lock, and it stays theirs.
The six, one at a time
My Missionary Book — mymissionarybook.com
Preserves: emails and the photos attached to them.
Costs: $149.99, one time. Their page lists email collection, a hardbound book of up to 300 pages, a free digital PDF and standard US shipping, with additional pages at $0.30 each to a maximum of 450, and extra printed copies from $69.99. They say plainly that it is not a subscription. US shipping only.
Suits: a family who wants one decision and one payment. The missionary gets an address, the letters land there, you review the book online and order it.
MyMissionLetters — mymissionletters.com
Preserves: emails with their embedded photos and attachments, photos and files you upload yourself — the mission call letter, maps, talks, scanned handwritten letters — and social posts.
Costs: three one-time prices. A digital memory book at $49. A hardcover at $99, described on their page as one hardcover of up to 700 pages. And a $29 add-on that manages the weekly email list for a new missionary. Every option includes the full archive.
Suits: almost anyone whose goal is a bound book of a whole mission. Seven hundred pages inside a flat $99 is, at the time of writing, the most book per dollar here. If budget decides it, buy this one.
Missionary Memories — missionarymemories.com
Preserves: emails and photos, which you gather into their inbox and can edit before you approve the proof.
Costs: read them off their own pricing page before you plan around them — we have not verified their current numbers, and this is the kind of service whose headline price depends heavily on the page allowance.
Suits: a shorter book, or a family who intends to cut heavily before printing. The editing step is real and some families want it. But read the allowance: 100 pages is roughly a third of a mission's letters, so do the arithmetic below before treating $99 as the price.
Missionary Mailbag — missionarymailbag.com
Preserves: emails and the photos in them. Its distinguishing trick is reaching backwards: rather than a forwarding address, it connects a Gmail account and imports letters that have already arrived, which makes it the one service here built to work after a mission has ended.
Costs: $129 hardbound with 250 pages included, then $5 for each additional block of ten pages, read from their own pricing page. The book is $129 hardbound with 250 pages included, then $5 for each additional block of ten pages. Their page notes that books over 600 pages may be split into two volumes.
Suits: a family who has already missed the beginning. If your missionary is a year in and the letters are sitting unsorted in your inbox, this is the one on the list designed to reach back and collect them rather than to catch them as they arrive.
My Mission Moments — mymissionmoments.com
Preserves: weekly emails, photos, and material that never was email — the mission call letter, talks, blog posts, PDFs and Google Docs, including scanned journals.
Costs: from $249, described on their page as up to 500 formatted pages, 8.5 x 11 hardcover, with a free shareable PDF. Their page lists add-ons between $50 and $145, including hand formatting for material that never was email. Turnaround is quoted on their own page, so read it there before you plan a date around it. They design in one to three business days and the book arrives in about three weeks.
Suits: a mission whose record is scattered across formats, or a family who would rather a person laid out the pages than a template. It is the dearest of the print services and the only one openly selling human hands on the work. If your missionary blogged or kept a paper journal, that $50 hand-formatting line may be the whole reason to choose it.
One word worth clearing up: "mission calls" on their page means the call letter, not telephone calls.
MyMission.com — mymission.com
Preserves: emails, photos and stories, on a free missionary website with a companion mobile app, compiled into a book.
Costs: the site markets its tools as free. We could not find a book price on the pages we checked, so check their own pricing before you plan around it.
Suits: a family who wants a free public home for the letters and is willing to ring them about the book. Free is a genuine advantage and should not be talked past.
Where the price actually lives: page count
The headline prices above are not comparable, because the page allowances are not. A mission's letters commonly run past three hundred pages once photos are in — though the same letters make a longer book at 6 x 9 than at A4, so treat 350 as a working figure and ask each company what your own count would come to on their page size. For a 350-page book, using each company's own published rates:
| Service | Headline | A 350-page book |
|---|---|---|
| MyMissionLetters | $99 | $99 — allowance is 700 |
| My Missionary Book | $149.99 | $164.99 |
| Missionary Mailbag | $129 | $179 |
| Missionary Memories | $99 | $224 |
| My Mission Moments | from $249 | $249 — allowance is 500 |
Two of those headlines start at $99 and finish more than a hundred dollars apart. That is probably the most useful thing on this page, and it costs us nothing to say.
What none of the six keeps
Look back at those six lists. Emails. Photos. Files. Blog posts.
Not the call.
None of the six advertises recording your weekly family video call, or keeping your missionary's voice. Their books are made of things that were already text, which is reasonable, because text is easy and audio is not.
But the letters were never the part you were most afraid of losing. You already have the letters. What you do not have is the fifteen minutes on a preparation day when they told you about the family they had been teaching and their voice went strange in the middle of it. That happened once. If nobody was recording, no service on this page can go back for it.
One thing we make
This is the part you can skip. Everything above works without us, and several of those services are cheaper.
Missionary Legacy is the archive kind rather than the print kind. Letters, chats and photos file themselves by date as they arrive. A biographer asks your missionary one question on preparation day. Your family gets a permanent call room, and the weekly video call is recorded, transcribed, and the voices told apart — a name goes on a voice only where there is evidence for it, because a wrong name printed in a hardbound book is a false record of who said something.
It is $19 a month on Standard and $24 on Premium, with a $49 setup fee once and a fourteen-day trial. The only difference between the tiers is that on Premium the recorder joins your call by itself and videos are kept as well as photos. On Standard you press record on the Calls page, and everything else — the letters, the chats, the transcripts, the biographer — is identical. A whole mission can also be prepaid as a pass. The numbers are on the pricing page.
Five things to know before that appeals to you.
- We cost more. Over a two-year mission, $19 a month plus the $49 setup comes to about $505, against a one-time $99 for a bound book. The printed book is charged separately on top of that, at $99 a volume for the standard hardbound edition, and a mission with a lot of letters runs to more than one volume. If what you want is the letters bound, one of the services above is the better purchase, and you should buy it.
- Family calls are kept as audio, not video. A weekly video call across a whole mission runs to something like a hundred gigabytes.
- Recording is a consent matter, not a feature. On Premium our recorder joins the call under our own name and sits in the participant list, never hidden. On Standard there is nothing for anyone to see: you press record on the Calls page and your own device's microphone picks up the call on speakerphone. Either way, visible is not the same as told. Recording law differs by state and by country, and your missionary is usually in another one. Say it out loud before the first recorded call.
- Nothing is mirrored off-site yet. A second copy of the photos and videos is built but not switched on, and call recordings and voice memos are not covered by it at all, so today most files exist in one place. We treat that as a gap rather than a design, and would rather say so — until it is fixed, keep your own copy of any recording you could not bear to lose. We treat that as a gap rather than a design, and would rather say so.
- We are not printing books yet. The book is specified and priced, and the archive is being built for it, but no printed volume has shipped. If you need a book in your hands this month, buy one from the list above.
If you are catching up, Archive Rescue takes the.mbox file Google Takeout gives you and imports a whole mission at once — each letter under its original date, copies from different relatives merged rather than repeated. The uploaded file is deleted when the import finishes.
The checklist
- Decide which product you actually want: a book of the letters, or a record of the mission as it happens. They are different purchases and only one of them has a deadline.
- Export your own copy of the letters first, free, whatever you buy afterwards.
- Estimate your page count, then price each service at that number rather than the headline.
- If it is only the letters bound, buy the cheapest one whose allowance covers your count.
- If your missionary is still out, decide this month whether the calls matter to you.
- Never hand over a password or a verification code, to anyone, for any of this.