How it works
The mechanism
This page describes what actually happens, including the parts that are unflattering. If anything here changes, we will tell you before it does.
“Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made.”
Genesis 3:1
Step 1
You write, we seal
You write your letter and name the people it should reach — by email address, by postal address, or both. The letter is encrypted with a key unique to it before it is stored.
That encryption protects your letter from anyone who steals our database. It does not protect it from us, and it cannot. The entire point of the service is that we can open your letter at a moment when you are not available to open it for us, which means we hold a key that works without you. Any service in this category that claims your letter is unreadable to them is either confused or lying.
Step 2
What actually triggers delivery
Nothing in the world announces the rapture in a way software can read. There is no feed to subscribe to, no signal, no test. Anyone who tells you their system detects it is describing something that does not exist.
So we do the only honest thing available: a person decides. Delivery is started by hand, by one of a named group of administrators, and by nothing else. There is no timer, no heartbeat, no automatic condition anywhere in the system that can start it on its own.
Starting it takes two separate actions a day apart. The first records who is declaring and why, and sends nothing. A full day has to pass before the second is even possible, and during that day any administrator can call it off. Only the second action delivers, and it delivers everything at once and cannot be undone. The delay exists so that a mistaken click, or one stolen login in a single sitting, is not enough to empty the system.
Be clear about what this is. This is a human judgement, not a detection. Nobody here can perceive the rapture any better than you can. What we are actually promising is that a specific person, who by the premise of this service would be among those left behind, will look at the world and decide that the day has come. If they are wrong, your letter goes to living people. If they never decide at all, your letter waits indefinitely. We think a person deciding openly is more honest than a machine inferring it from our silence, but it is not a guarantee, and we will not describe it as one.
Step 3
What your people receive
Your letter, unedited, with a short note at the top explaining who it is from and why it has arrived. The people you name never asked to hear from us, and a message from someone who has vanished would be frightening without context. We send once. We do not add them to anything.
Step 4
What can go wrong
- Postal addresses go stale. This is the likeliest failure by a wide margin. People move. You can update an address at any time, and you should. We do not yet send you a reminder to check them — we intend to, and until we do, this is the failure most likely to affect you.
- It can be started when it should not be. An administrator can be wrong, or coerced, or compromised. Your letter would go to people who are still alive, including you. Two actions a day apart make this unlikely, not impossible.
- It can fail to be started at all. This is the failure worth understanding, because nothing in the system will notice it. If the people who hold this responsibility are gone, or unreachable, or simply never decide, your letter waits forever and no one is told. You would never learn that it did not arrive, and neither would the people you wrote to.
- This is built to last. You are paying once for a service that may need to run for decades. We designed it that way on purpose — one payment, no subscription, no outside investors, as few moving parts as possible. The simpler it is, the longer it runs.
Step 5
You can change your mind
You can edit your letter, change who receives it, or delete it outright at any time, for as long as we hold it. Deleting removes it from our store; we cannot recover it afterwards, and neither can anyone else.