This is a submission for the Postmark Challenge: Inbox Innovators.
What I Built
I made https://dearme.email/. It's a service that let's you send an email to yourself, which you receive after 30 days.
What could you use this for? You can send yourself reminders, check in on your goals, and maybe benefit from the perspective of listening to your past self. In an age where bots are everywhere, it's nice to be able to have a human connection with yourself. Not to mention the fact that you can actually do a bit of time travelling, which is awesome.
Demo
You can send an email to [email protected] and it will be sent back to you in 30 days. We encrypt the email on our end, decrypt it when it's time to send it back and then we delete the message from our systems. We do demand that you varify your email. If you don't do that within 30 days we delete the message.
How I Built It
It's a fairly basic Python/postgres setup with Flask. Postmark really takes care of most of the hard bits here. There's a webhook and a cronjob too, but nothing too fancy.
I might add payments later to help cover the postgres costs, which I'll probably build with lemonsqueezy. But assuming there's not a huge demand for this app overnight I should be fine. Postmark has reasonable pricing and they also do some spam detection (which is a concern of mine given that anyone can email).
Top comments (7)
wow such a unique idea. maybe you can set for how long after you want to receive the email by adjusting the email its being sent from, like [email protected]
I was thinking to make this app mostly free, but allow some users to pay for these extra features, mainly to ensure that I don't pay for the whole thing out of pocket.
By the way, did you not get the verification email?
nope
Interesting innovative thinking.
I'm sure you've thought about existing reminders and even the same features like sending a scheduled email, but its the idea itself of rethinking the "note to self" combined with "time capsule" combination that makes this innovation special and unique.
I wonder what else you got there! This is a very interesting product!! Thanks!
pretty cool idea, been lowkey wishing for something like this tbh - you ever notice if future-you actually listens when you write these or you always just cringe at old self?
That's partially the goal, yeah! It's kind of hard to ignore advice when you're the one giving it.