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Comment by glenneroo | Hacker News Reader

You might enjoy https://www.futureme.org (there are others as well I see, but I think they were the first). I've used it with a few friends and myself over the last ~15 years - usually in 1-5 year increments. Whenever I receive an email, I make sure to type out a response over the next few days and send it off to be received in x years. It has always been a nice surprise receiving a "diary" entry from myself in the past, especially when I make note of current affairs... particularly in the future, past problems always seem so insignificant... and it's always surprising how often many of my plans were completely thwarted.

edit: pro-tip: type it out using your favorite editor in case your browser crashes or something!

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Interesting!

I guess this can now be done with Gmail/Superhuman/Boomerang "send later" feature as well.

Nice, I never even knew that existed with gmail! Probably because I never use gmail's native interface. Won't the messages always show up in gmail's draft folder though? That would eliminate a big part of the surprise ;)

I particularly like that FutureMe is a service solely dedicated to the task of sending an email in 1/3/5 years. I'm guessing infra-costs are pretty low - the site hasn't changed much in 15 years i.e. I would hope they can continue running long into the future, whereas some of these other services are at the whims (gmail excluded) of survival against a multitude of competing services and being able to continue running long into the future. A lot changes in 5 years - it feels like a lot of services from 15 years ago don't even exist anymore. Oh and a nice bonus for some people - you can allow your emails to be shown publicly (and anonymously ;)

> I'm guessing infra-costs are pretty low - the site hasn't changed much in 15 years

Not necessarily ;) IMHO what matters is their actual traffic. For each user they are going to send an email in the future. If they have 10 daily users, then that's 10 emails in let's say a year. Those users are daily, so a year after their acquisition they will send 10 emails/day, everyday.

Where I'm getting to is the delay doesn't matter much long-term, because they will eventually need to send all those emails whilst serving new users. It's all about their user base, not delay.

Obviously, their use case might simply be what limits daily active users thus the "usage loan" to pay back in the future :D

Good points. OTOH they don't allow attachments and text can be compressed pretty well, plus I somehow doubt most people are sending new messages daily or even monthly. The friends I use it with all write one or two emails to each recipient to be delivered in x years, where recipients won't even know about the existence thereof until x years later. We then tend to reply to each of those messages once after receiving. I personally try to write 3 messages to myself for delivery in 1, 3, and 5 years... the longer the delay, the greater the level of retrospective silliness. Overall I think there isn't a lot of traffic and it's such an obscure service, every person I've mentioned it to has never even heard of it.

It sure would be interesting to see some stats though! :)

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