Ask HN: How to send a message to someone 20 years into the future?
Hey there, so I just found out that I'm gonna be a dad soon, and I had this idea to create an email account for my future kid. I wanna send them random stuff like thoughts, facts, and stories until they hit 20.
But now I'm stuck trying to decide which email provider to use, and also wondering if email will still be a thing by then.
Anyway, I thought I'd turn to you folks on Hacker News for some advice. What do you think?
34 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 59.6 ms ] threadHave you considered gluing stuff into a scrapbook instead?
With multiple time horizons, choose a physical persistence medium appropriate for each.
Currently, Fastmail seems like a pretty good bet, but you can switch without changing the email address.
It sounded like the Mom was looking both to pass on her wisdom to her child, to help prepare her child, and also to control her child's life after the Mom passed away (it's been a while since I listened to it but I don't remember it being presented as a malicious choice - the Mom herself may not have been conscious of it).
I'm not saying that you'll do this, but it's worth thinking about as you start piling up messages to deliver later.
[1] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/401/transcript
I personally can't think of an online service I'd trust to keep my emails for 20 years. I'd absolutely want them on a machine I'm running myself.
Even if the service is around in 20 years, there's a high probability that the account will be disabled or deleted for nonuse.
I decided a priori to stick with email, both because I can't imagine email going away anytime soon, and also because sending an email two main benefits: (1) the content is plain text, and should remain easily readable at the destination, and (2) you get automatic "backups" in your own Sent folder.
I also wanted to avoid any free services because there's no guarantee they'll stick around, or in the case of something like Gmail, keep the account around unused. And, although I'm a really happy paying Fastmail customer for many years, a new email address on my account felt a bit _too_ expensive for just this purpose (especially since I'll eventually pay for an actual address for them).
Because I already pay $5/month for a tiny Linode instance for other purposes, I decided to self-host. Because I don't plan on having the account send any emails (the hard part of self-hosting), setup was relatively pain-free with Postfix. It took a bit of configuration and testing, but I now have an email account for my little one hosted on a subdomain which reliably receives email and stores it in plain-text on the server. Because I set things up in the Maildir format, in the future, it should be simple to also run Dovecot to provide an IMAP interface to actually get at the emails, or import them elsewhere.
I ran into a bunch of pain points throughout the learning process here that I can share, but don't have a reason to believe you'll run into them too, so I don't want to overwhelm. More than happy to get into the specifics of any part of the process if you want!
My plan is to keep it entirely organic — so far have I've only really sent a few emails around the more meaningful-feeling milestones. (Arriving home, one week, etc.) I think, long-term, I'd prefer to have the amount of content not feel _overwhelming_ when I hand it off; I'm not planning on having this be the primary way to document my kid's life, but as something "extra" to be able to pass off to them.
[Also, being a few weeks in: I'd warn against making any plans for the first few weeks assuming you'll have much brain capacity available to you. I'd say, don't stress yourself out too much if you can avoid it.]
My best bet is on Ethereum still being around in 20 years as it so entrenched.it'll be there for you. As long as people want to pay for using a blockchain to validators.
Non-technology, I would use a notary.
1. https://www.toptal.com/ethereum-smart-contract/time-locked-w...
Sarcophagus looks like the closest thing available right now, but it's still unproven enough that I wouldn't really count on it working 20 years from now: https://sarcophagus.io/
Time-locked wallets solve the potential issue of transferring value at some point after death, but can't be used to transfer messages.. not ones which aren't readable at the time you send them anyway
I know this isn’t exactly what you were asking for — apologies please let me suggest changing your goal slightly to try and give your kid a message every year, not just all at once at twenty. More than that let me suggest you do this activity with your kid and not alone.
I’ve seen my child change so fast and I promise you they would rather have gifts and thoughts from you each year then in a big pile at the end. You will also know them much better five years from now (and ten and fifteen) so the letter will mean more to them because of what you know to put in it.
That said, you can still be clever with time! Every year you could write a letter to open in 1, 3, 5 and 10 years so a fifteen year old could have letters from several different times. Don’t forget to include pictures of you and your kid in each one and messages from the kid themselves. They will love it.
It turns out kids just want you to be with them. Use this as a way to be with them.
And lastly, if that suggestion doesn’t feel like enough to you, consider writing a journal about your life and write some of the more personal messages to them there instead. We can’t predict when our kid will want to know us as people better, but it’s probably well into adulthood. When that happens they won’t want advice as much as wanting to know you and all your dreams and struggles.
Good luck and congratulations!
I'd be far more interested in ways of sending messages to the past.
Put it into a safety deposit box.
Create a will mentioning said box explicitly, just in case something happens.
For the techy solution, in addition to above, create emails with the big 3, Apple, Google and Microsoft. Send the emails to them. Include passwords in the safety deposit box.
Add the message to a DynamoDB table with a send date. Create an Eventbridge rule that runs every month and calls a Lambda function. Have the Lambda function query the DynamoDB table and email you the message using SES if the time stamp is reached.
Assuming AWS doesn’t change their free tier in the next 20 years, this should be free.