What happens between writing a letter and its delivery

Once you confirm a letter, FuturePostman keeps it and sends it on its day. You do not have to be signed in for that. This page follows an email letter and a paper letter from that moment until they arrive, and says what happens when something goes wrong.

While the letter waits

• FuturePostman checks every minute which letters are due. A letter goes out with the first check after its time has come.
• An email letter has an exact date and time, in the time zone of the device you wrote it on. A paper letter has a posting day, without a time.
• An email letter is counted against your month when you schedule it. It is still delivered if you later move to a smaller plan or use up your letters for the month.
• A letter that is waiting is listed under Manage Letters, and you can delete it there. Changing a scheduled email letter needs a plan that includes it: Postmaster. A paper letter can be changed on every plan until 1 hour before it is posted.

Email letters

The notice email

On the delivery time every recipient gets a notice email. Your text is not in it.

• Every address in To, Cc and Bcc gets its own notice, with its own link and its own access code. No recipient sees the others. A link opens only together with the email address it was sent to.
• The notice is sent from the address of FuturePostman, not from yours. Its subject line is always You have received a message from the past.
• It shows your name as the sender, or an anonymous sender if you chose Send anonymously. It also shows the date on the letter, the access code, the day and time the link stops working, and the names of attached files.
• It does not show your subject, your text or the files themselves. The recipient sees those after opening the letter.
• The notice is written in English, whatever language you use the app in.

To open the letter the recipient follows the link, types the email address the letter was sent to and the access code, and presses Open the letter. After 3 wrong tries with one email address the letter is locked for that address for 15 minutes. What your recipient sees and how they open the letter describes that page in full.

How long the link stays open

You choose this in the composer with Link stays open for. The choices are 1 hour, 1 day, 5 days, 30 days, 90 days, and 1 year. If you do not change it, it is 90 days.

• The clock starts when the letter is delivered, not when you write it. A letter scheduled ten years ahead is open for the time you chose, counted from its delivery.
• After the last day the link shows This letter can no longer be opened. The recipient cannot extend it.
• You can give a delivered letter more time, with or without files. Open the letter in Manage Letters and press Extend link, or use Extend Expiration on the Files page. The link and every file of the letter are extended together. A link never stays open longer than 1 year from today.
• Do not wait too long: an expired link and its files are kept for at least 30 days and are then removed for good. The steps are in Extend the time.
• The letter stays in your own list under Manage Letters after the link has closed.

If an email letter cannot be delivered

• Sent means the notice was handed to the mail system for every recipient. It does not tell whether the email landed in the inbox or in a spam folder. Viewed means a recipient has opened the letter with the access code.
• If the notice cannot be sent to one of the recipients, FuturePostman tries again by itself, up to 5 times, with pauses that grow from a few minutes to a day. Meanwhile the letter shows Trying again with the time of the next try. The date you chose is not changed, and only recipients who were not reached get the notice again.
• A letter that cannot be delivered shows Not delivered and is not tried again by itself. That happens when the tries are used up, when the mail system rejects an address, or when the address refuses the email.
• At that moment you get an email with the subject Your letter could not be delivered, sent to the address of your account. It names the letter by its subject and says why it failed. Your text is not in it. The dashboard also shows a line with the number of letters that could not be sent.
• Open the letter in Manage Letters to read the reason. Correct an address with Edit, on every plan, or send the letter once more with Try again.
• If a notice got lost after delivery, open the letter in Manage Letters and press Send the notice again next to the recipient. They get a new link and a new access code. The earlier ones keep working.

All statuses and the retries are explained in What the status of an email letter means. The steps for a failed letter are in An email letter shows Not delivered or Trying again.

Paper letters

1. 01

   It waits for the posting day

   The letter is handed to the print centre at 12:00 UTC on the posting day. With Now it is handed over within the hour. The review dialog shows until when you can change the letter and until when you can delete it.

2. 02

   It is checked and printed

   The print centre checks the file and the address, prints the letter and puts it in an envelope. The letter shows At the print centre and then Printing.

3. 03

   It is posted

   The envelope goes to the postal service and the letter shows Posted. A standard letter is not tracked after this point.

4. 04

   It arrives

   How long the post takes depends on the country. The composer shows the estimate of the print centre next to each delivery option when there is one. Only a tracked letter is confirmed as Delivered.

If a paper letter runs into a problem

• If the hand-over fails before anything reached the print centre, FuturePostman tries again up to 3 times, 15 minutes apart.
• If it still fails, if the print centre stops the letter (often because of the address), or if the post returns it as undeliverable, you get an email with the subject A problem with your paper letter and a link to the letter.
• After that a paper letter is never sent again by itself, because every send is printed and paid. The page of the letter says what was wrong and what you can do: Send now to try again without paying twice, or Delete to get the credits back and send a corrected letter.
• Credits for a letter that was already posted are not returned, also when the post sends it back. Such a letter shows Returned, and you can take it off your list with Remove from list.

See Follow a paper letter: tracking and statuses and Change or delete a paper letter and get credits back.

What you see meanwhile

• The dashboard lists the letters that leave next under Next to leave.
• Manage Letters has one tab for each kind, Email and Paper letter, with the status of every letter.
• Click an email letter to open Email Details. For a delivered letter it shows until when the link is open and lists the recipients under Notices.
• A paper letter has its own page with the section Where it is, each step with its date under What has happened, and the text under Your letter.
• You do not get an email when an email letter is delivered or opened. Look at its status instead. You do get one when a letter cannot be delivered.

Good to know

• With Now, an email letter is usually delivered within a few minutes.
• The date printed on a paper letter is the posting day, unless you set another one under Date written on the letter. It can be set up to 1 year back.
• A scheduled letter uses the name in your profile on the day it goes out, not the name you had when you wrote it. A paper letter prints your postal address the same way, as it stands in your profile on the posting day.
• When more email letters are due in the same minute than one check handles, letters from plans with priority delivery go first. The others follow with the next checks.

• What your recipient sees and how they open the letterThe notice email, the unlock page, reading the letter and getting its files, step by step. You can pass this page on to a recipient who is stuck.
• What the status of an email letter meansEvery status an email letter can show in Manage Letters, what happens behind it, and what you can still do with the letter in each one.
• Follow a paper letter: tracking and statusesWhere to follow a paper letter, what each step and status means, and what to do when a letter is stopped, fails or comes back.
• How your letters are protectedWhat FuturePostman encrypts, how a recipient proves who they are, when a link stops working, what staff can see and where the protection ends.

• In the appManage LettersSee the letters that are waiting and the ones that were delivered.