Why should I write a letter to the future?

Getting a surprise letter from the past is actually an amazing experience - just check out all the people that agree. And we are very good at delivering emails from the past - we've been doing it for almost twenty years! So send your future self some words of inspiration or comfort. Or make a prediction about your life, your family or the world. What will the future look like in a year, five years...more?

OK, but what if my email changes?

Use an email address that you plan to keep for a long time (gmail, hotmail, yahoo, etc) rather than your work address for that job you hate. You can also change the email for your future letters from your FutureMe from the "Your Letters" page. Your letter will be delivered from the email address: mailer (then the at sign) futureme.org, so you may want to tell your email to make sure and allow and that address and mark those email as important.

How much does it cost to use FutureMe?

FutureMe is free for basic use, but we would be honored if you would consider upgrading to a Premium account (for the cost of a fancy coffee drink!) since FutureMe requires money and time to guarantee the delivery of your letters all the way to the future. Premium members also get some extra features, including the ability to add pictures to your letters, send letters to others, and ask our support team to help you find any long lost letters.

I am a teacher - can I use this with my students?

Yes! Thousands of teachers have used FutureMe over the years. We have even created a special version just for teachers Also - make sure that your students are able to receive emails from our domain (futureme.org) as by default many schools prevent outside senders and we don't want your students to lose their letters!

"Public, but anonymous"? What's the deal with that?

If you designate your email as "public, but anonymous", it will be included in the public letters section. Your email address will never be shown or shared, but the body and the subject of the letter will be. Please refrain from mentioning specific people in a public letter (and if you do, we reserve the right to delete your letter. Read our terms of service for more details.

Can you help me find my long lost letter?

Once you are a registered user you can always access your letters from your FutureMe account. If you still can't find your letter, due to the volume of letters written to the future (millions!) we can only help find letters in the haystack from Premium FutureMe members. Once you are a member and want help finding a letter, please send a support request through the Contact link below.

Can I FutureMe (verb!) other people?

You can send letters to others, but only if you are a registered user and signed in. When they get the email, it will specify that it was sent from your email address.

Can I change a FutureMe (noun too!) that I've already written?

From your FutureMe account page, you will be able to delete a letter, change the email address, or its public/private status. But you cannot change the date the letter was sent to or edit the content of the letter. This, we feel, would be cheating, as well as a potential violation of the space-time continuum. So please take care when writing to the future - it's serious business, after all.

Can I advertise on your site? Or how about a cobranded version for my business?

We appreciate your interest! We do have the ability to create co-branded FutureMe sites - check out FutureMe Pro. If you want to discuss more please drop us a line by following the link below and we'll invite you to our yacht to talk business. Except we don't have a yacht, so it might just have to be a phone call.

I wrote my letter in a non-English language and it came all scrambled. Why do you Americans hate people from other countries?

Yeah...sorry about that. It's a long story having to do with default language encodings of databases not quite being "international-friendly" back in 2002 when we set this up. But - with this new version, we have everything right. There are web-sites that might let you convert your old letters into the language of your choice. you can read more about that at Wikipedia (scroll down for some links to converter sites). Here is a good side for converting Asian characters and here's one for Cyrillic. Some users (thanks Abdulla!) have reported that they can recover their letters if they save the text in Notepad as Unicode and not Ansi, and then open in Word with Arabic encoding.

What's next for FutureMe? I have an idea!

Please add your ideas to the feedback forum and we'll see what we can do.

How do I get in touch with people who run FutureMe?

Right here!