A messaging app built on one rule, and a great deal of restraint about the rest.
Your letter arrives when a letter would have arrived. You write it, you choose where it is going and which century it travels in, and then it is withheld for exactly as long as the real journey would have taken — forty-one days from Lisbon to Tokyo by clipper packet in 1850, four hours by Atlantic cable in 1866.
The delay is the product, not a limitation of it. Every other messaging app sells you less waiting. This one sells the wait.
Not by the app politely declining to show you the letter. The rule lives in the database: until a letter’s arrival time has passed, its text is not returned to the recipient by anything, including a modified app or somebody querying the interface directly. The recipient can see that something is coming, because the anticipation is the point. They cannot read a word of it early.
There is deliberately no mechanism to rush, skip, or preview a letter in transit. Not for you, not for the person waiting, and not for us.
1850 clipper packet at 130 miles a day, 1860 Pony Express relay at 250, 1900 mail steamer at 580, 1935 air mail at 2,000, and the 1866 Atlantic cable at a flat four hours. Distances are great-circle, measured point to point.
You add a person by their username, and nothing happens until they add you back. There is no directory, no search, and no way to find somebody you were not given a handle by — which removes an entire category of unwanted contact rather than moderating it afterwards.
You can open yourself to an anonymous correspondent instead. They are known to you only by a city and a crossing time. Matching happens in moments, not weeks — only the letter is slow, so nobody waits to discover a correspondence was never going to exist.
A letter in transit has a departure, a position and an arrival date. You can watch it cross. You cannot hurry it.
A letter that has not yet departed can be edited or withdrawn. Once it has sailed it is gone, in the way a letter dropped into a postbox is gone. Your own copies can be archived or deleted, and deleted letters wait thirty days in case you did not mean it.
Every letter can be reported and every correspondent blocked, from the letter itself. Blocking is silent and immediate, and stops letters already at sea. Reports are read by a person. Because a crossing takes weeks, a reported sender can often be dealt with before their next letter reaches anybody.
The app tells you when a letter lands. That is the whole of it. There is no badge counting things at you and no reason to open it in between.
Printed, addressed and put in the actual post, to arrive in a real letterbox. It is being built and it is not ready. When it comes, a paper letter can only carry a delivery window rather than a date — no printer in the world can promise the day it lands.
No read receipts. No typing indicators. No delivery checkmarks. No last-seen, no online dots, no streaks, and nothing else that implies or rewards speed. If a feature would make you check the app more often, it is the wrong feature for this app.
Correspondents are anonymous to each other and never to us. That second half is deliberate: if somebody who abuses this service could not be identified and removed, the whole thing becomes unusable for everybody else.
Nothing. Receiving letters is free and unlimited, and always will be — every letter needs somebody at the other end, and charging them would be a strange way to run a correspondence. Paid tiers may exist one day for people who write a great deal. None are being sold today.
Being built. It is not on the App Store yet, and this page will not pretend otherwise. There is a waiting list on the front page, and the fast way to hear about it is to put your address in — just that once.