alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Web app that lets you send email time capsules
I had an issue where I would journal stuff, and then never look at what I wrote. So I thought it'll be cool to schedule something that will get sent to you at a later time (like a time capsule). Also, was inspired by futureme, where you can send yourself letters that'll arrive in the future.
Comments
I hear about time capsule apps from time to time and my main concern about them is longevity.
Will this application exist in say 10 years from now? 20? And even then will I be using the same email by then?
This is very cool and makes me smile because I used to use a simplified version of this as a take home project in engineering interviews.
One usecase I find particularly interesting is predictions. People often predict the future like “in 2 years we will have AGI” etc. It would be fun to fact check these predictions on the exact date 2 years later. Pick top tech leaders or politicians and scrape all their predictions and make a leaderboard of who got it right or messed up. could be fun to try.
This reminded me of a more whimsical old service that used real snails to send email at some indeterminate time. Looks like their home page is still up but it's totally defunct: http://www.realsnailmail.net/ The only message I sent with it (or at least that made it through, maybe I sent more that I don't remember) was initiated in June 2008, at last collected by a snail in May 2011, and the snail Marko delivered it in August 2011.
just use a calendar event, it's more robust, and gives you the same feeling of 'oh yea...'
Gmail has this feature built in, you can plan the sending of an email for a later point in time.
You might like Diarium, a local-first journaling app that will bring up past entries a year later. Since journalling is private, not everyone is comfortable sharing with an email provider.