How to save your missionary's emails and photos before the account closes

Your missionary's missionary.org account does not last forever. Sometime after they come home it stops opening, and then it is deleted. Everything that lived only inside it goes with it: the photos in their Google Photos, whatever sat in their Drive, their contacts, their whole mailbox.

Nobody emails you a warning. There is no countdown on a screen. It works, and then one day it does not.

If you read nothing else: have your missionary sign in at mail.missionary.org and tell you whether it still opens. Everything else here follows from that one answer. Below, you will find what is actually at risk, what the reported timing is and why nobody can give you your exact date, and then the free steps to save all of it yourself. You do not need to buy anything, from us or from anyone. We make a product, and it is described near the bottom in one section you can skip. The steps above it work without it.

First, the part that should calm you down

Every letter your missionary sent home is already in your inbox. That copy is yours. It sits on your account, and the Church closing their account does not reach into yours and take it. If the only thing you care about is the weekly letter that came to you, you are not on anyone's clock.

What is on a clock is everything that exists only inside their account:

• The photos they uploaded to Google Photos over two years, including any album they made
• Anything in their Google Drive — a journal kept in Docs, talks, planners, scans
• Their contacts: companions, converts, members, the people they will want to find in ten years
• Their sent mail, which includes letters they wrote to people other than you
• The shared album link they sent you, which stops working when the account behind it is gone

Work down that list first. Your own inbox can wait until the weekend.

The timing, and why no one can tell you your date

Take every number below as reported, not published. The Church does not put a deletion schedule anywhere a family can check, and that absence is the whole problem.

What families and returned missionaries consistently report is this:

• Around 90 days after the release date, the missionary account stops being accessible. This is the most commonly repeated figure, from several independent sources, and the change appears to date to about May 2024.
• Somewhere between 90 and 180 days, a returned missionary who signs in at mail.missionary.org may be offered an Extend Access option, reported to grant roughly another 15 days.
• Around 180 days, the account is deleted.
• Several of those same reports warn that somewhere between 90 and 120 days the contents may already be beyond reach, even when sign-in still appears to work.

Now the part most articles leave out. None of that is official policy you can point at. A BYU student-newspaper article from 23 October 2024 gives the 90 and 120-day figures, but attributes them to a private individual rather than to any Church source. The Church's own technology forum carries flatly contradictory claims: one moderator describing an eighteen-month window, another saying five months and it is gone. And the policy has already changed at least once, in May 2024.

So the honest summary is this. The window is real. It is shorter than most families assume. It has moved before. And no one on the internet, this page included, knows your date.

That uncertainty is the reason to act, not a reason to relax. If you wait for someone to publish a number you can trust, you may be waiting past your own deadline.

Find out whether the account still opens

Have your missionary sign in at [mail.missionary.org](https://mail.missionary.org) with their own credentials. You cannot do this part for them. Use a computer rather than a phone; everything below involves downloads.

• If it opens normally, you have time. Do the steps below this week anyway.
• If it opens and offers Extend Access, take it, and then do the steps below tonight. Reported to buy about fifteen days, not fifteen weeks.
• If it will not open, skip ahead to If the account is already gone.

Do not trust an article, ours included, over what that sign-in page tells you.

Save what lives only in their account

Signed in as them, on a computer, with an hour and somewhere to put a large download. That means either they sit at the keyboard, or they give you the password and stay near their phone, because Google will text a sign-in code before it lets you in. If they are still in the field, ask on their next preparation day and plan to do it together. If they are home, do it at the kitchen table.

The fastest path takes all four at once through Google's own export tool.

1. Go to [takeout.google.com](https://takeout.google.com), signed in to the missionary account.
2. Click Deselect all at the top.
3. Scroll down and check Mail, Drive, Google Photos, and Contacts.
4. Scroll to the bottom and click Next step.
5. Choose Send download link via email, frequency Export once, file type .zip, and a size of 2 GB or larger.
6. Click Create export.

Google builds the export and emails a link. For a mailbox alone this can be minutes. For two years of photos it can be hours, or more than a day, and it usually arrives as several zip files rather than one. Download every part as soon as the link arrives — it does not stay live indefinitely, and a link that expires while the account is closing is a bad way to lose the mission.

If Takeout has been turned off. Missionary accounts are managed by an organization, and an organization can disable Takeout. If the page tells you your administrator has turned this off, use these instead, one service at a time:

• Photos — go to photos.google.com, open Albums, open the album, and use the three-dot menu at the top right. If Download all is offered, take it. If not, hover the first photo and click its checkmark, scroll to the bottom, hold Shift and click the last one, then use the three-dot menu and choose Download. Do this album by album, and also for anything not in an album.
• Drive — go to drive.google.com, select the top folder, right-click, and choose Download. Google zips it for you.
• Contacts — go to contacts.google.com, click Export in the left sidebar, choose Google CSV, and click Export.
• Mail — Gmail has no bulk forward. Select a batch of messages, open the three-dot More menu above the list, and choose Forward as attachment, sending them to a permanent personal address. It is tedious. Start with the newest year and work backwards, because that is the year no one else has copies of.

One detail worth knowing. Families report that the captions their missionary typed under photos do not come through when you download from a shared album page. If the sentence they wrote under the picture matters to you, take the export from their own account, then open a few photos in the download and check the captions are actually there before you rely on it.

Save the letters that are already yours

This is the safe, unhurried half. Your Gmail keeps these letters until you delete them. The export below is a second copy in case something happens to your account, not a rescue against a deadline.

1. Go to mail.google.com, signed in to the account the letters arrive in.
2. In the search box, type from: followed by their missionary address — for example from:name@missionary.org — and press Enter.
3. Click the checkbox at the top left to select the page of results, then click the line that appears offering to select all conversations that match this search.
4. Click the label icon (a tag) above the list, choose Create new, name it Mission, and click Create.
5. Search again for to:name@missionary.org and apply the same label. Your own letters to them only exist in two places: your sent mail, and the account that is closing.
6. Go to [takeout.google.com](https://takeout.google.com), still signed in as yourself.
7. Click Deselect all, then scroll down and check only Mail.
8. Click the All Mail data included button, turn off Include all messages in Mail, check only Mission, and click OK.
9. Click Next step, choose Send download link via email, Export once, .zip, and click Create export.
10. Download the zip when it arrives. Inside is a file ending in .mbox. That single file is every letter, each with its original date and any photos that were attached.

If letters went to several people, each of them can do exactly this on their own inbox. Nobody has the complete set. Dad has some, a brother or a sister has some, a grandmother has the ones nobody else got.

What to do with the.mbox file

An.mbox is one file holding all the messages. Two honest options:

• Treat it as a backup and keep reading them in Gmail. Perfectly reasonable. Put the zip on an external drive and in a cloud account that is not the same Google account, and get on with your life.
• Open it. The free program that reads mbox files is Thunderbird, from thunderbird.net. Install it, open the menu at the top right, choose Add-ons and Themes, search for ImportExportTools NG and add it. Then right-click Local Folders in the left sidebar, choose ImportExportTools NG, then Import mbox file, and pick your file. This is the one genuinely fiddly step on this page. If it fights you, leave the zip where it is — nothing is at risk once you have it — and ask someone who is good with computers.

Two copies in two places. A single laptop is not a backup.

If the account is already gone

You should be told this plainly, because someone will eventually try to sell you the opposite: an account the Church has deleted cannot be recovered. Not by Google's account-recovery form, which is for accounts you personally own. Not by us. Not by any service. If anyone claims they can get it back, that is the moment to close the tab.

What survives is more than you think.

Every letter they sent home still exists in the inbox of whoever received it. Ask everyone — parents, siblings, grandparents, friends, ward members, the family that hosted them before they left. Each person runs the export steps above on their own account. Overlapping copies are not a problem; duplicates are easy to merge later, and missing letters are not.

Photos survive in more places than the album. Check the attachments on the emails you already have. Check whatever anyone downloaded from the shared album while it still opened. Check the missionary's own phone or camera, and any device they used before they left. Check anything they or the family posted publicly.

And sit down with your missionary this year. The photos you recover will have no dates and no names on them. They can still tell you who that companion was, what that street was called, and why they took the picture. That knowledge has its own quiet deadline, and it is the only archive that no export can reach.

While they are still out, so this does not happen again

If your missionary is still serving, you can close this whole problem in ten minutes:

• Ask them to CC one permanent family address on every weekly letter. Make a free Gmail just for it if you like. Then the letters live somewhere that is not one person's work inbox and not a mission account with an expiry date.
• Or auto-forward from your own Gmail. Settings, then See all settings, then Forwarding and POP/IMAP, then Add a forwarding address. Google sends a confirmation code to the destination. Add a filter so only their letters forward, not everything.
• Ask them to keep a copy of their photos off the mission account — their own phone, or a personal account — not only in the shared album.
• Write down their personal, non-`missionary.org` email address now, while asking is easy. After the account closes, it is the only way anything reaches them.
• Run the export once a year, not once at the end. A year of letters is a small download. Two years and every photo is not.

One thing we make

This is the part you can skip.

Missionary Legacy exists because the steps above are real work that most families never get to. When you start an archive, we create a private email address that belongs only to your missionary. Your missionary adds it To, CC or BCC on the letter they are already writing, or you point your own inbox at it, and every letter, photo and attachment files itself by its own date as it arrives. A shared Google Photos album link, or a Drive folder, is checked every hour.

If you are catching up, Archive Rescue takes exactly the.mbox file from the steps above and imports a whole mission at once — each letter filed under its original date, photos pulled out, and copies from different family members merged into one archive rather than repeated. The file you upload is deleted once the import finishes.

Weekly video calls can be recorded and transcribed, with each speaker named. When your family marks a moment worth keeping, that moment prints in the book beside a code you can scan to hear their voice say it.

At the end there is a hardbound book, about 400 pages a volume, from $99 a volume; most missions come to two or three. The archive is $49 to set up and $19 a month, or you can prepay the whole mission and the three months after it with a Sister Pass or an Elder Pass. Those numbers, and the book's, are on the pricing page.

What we cannot do is recover an account the Church has already deleted. Nobody can. That is why the free steps come first on this page and not last.

The checklist

1. Have your missionary sign in at mail.missionary.org and tell you what it says.
2. If it opens, run a Takeout export from their account tonight: Mail, Drive, Google Photos, Contacts.
3. Download every part of that export the moment the link arrives.
4. Label their letters in your Gmail and export them too, at your own pace.
5. Store two copies in two different places.
6. Ask everyone else who received letters to export their own.
7. Sit down with your missionary and put names and dates on the photos.

If they are already home, do step two this week. Sort out where it all lives afterwards. Whatever else you decide, do the export.