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Comment by HeyZuess | Hacker News Reader

I do something similar to this for my kids, they each have an email address which I send some pictures and/or message to every day. On my passing they will get the details to access the accounts.

I thought it was important to leave them something that they can reflect on, memories, thoughts, reasons, and an understanding of me in some ways and how they impacted on my life.

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Not sure what your system is, but if you have one, make sure your email provider isn't the kind that deletes addresses if no one has logged in in a year or two.

Yeah, I've already lost so much stuff due to this happening to a couple email accounts over the years. Or, I mean, entire services just shut down (Geocities, Yahoo Groups, etc.)

Thanks, good tip. I am using gmail and occasionally log into the accounts to ensure the emails are being received, and there are not problems with the account.

You should forward every email to an account on a different provider as well. For redundancy

Gmail does this too.

You might also enjoy FutureMe: https://www.futureme.org

You can send emails 10 years into the future! :)

Thanks, looks good.

I have been using futureme for over a decade now. Highly recommend.

Interested in any details you’re willing to share about how you use it. How often do you send one, and over what kind of timeframe? Been wanting to use it but never know what to write.

I used it as a journal. Starting in 2007, I wrote myself one email for each day of 2020. I didn't write very frequently, so it took the entire 13 years to finish. It made for a nice present to my future self. :)

This is a really cool idea, but an email account? That seems pretty unsafe to me. Accounts can be closed at random, the email provider can go under.

I don't know, maybe it's not better but I think I would feel better with a flash drive or something physical (which I would backup and replace every so often).

Email is the lowest friction for me, I can send something from pretty much any device and it is easy to access for them in future.

There have been a few comments on the long term accessibility of the account, like you mention. So I think it could be a good idea for me to look into doing a scheduled backup from gmail to a drive or other data storage option.

thankfully you should have copies of the emails in your account at least.

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