Chat that disappears: quick notes between letters

Letters are the point of Letter Trails. But sometimes you need to say "your letter just arrived and the stamps are gorgeous" right now, not in three weeks. That is what chat is for: quick notes between friends, in the margins of the real correspondence.

Messages vanish after 24 hours

Every chat message disappears 24 hours after it is sent. Gone from the app, deleted from the database. This is deliberate, and it does two jobs:

It keeps the letters primary. If chat kept history forever, conversations would slowly migrate off paper and the letters would become an accessory to a messaging app. A chat that evaporates stays what it should be: a sticky note, not a diary. Anything worth keeping belongs in the next letter, and that is exactly the nudge we want to give.

It keeps ephemeral things ephemeral. A quick "did it arrive?" from last Tuesday does not need to exist forever. Now it doesn't.

You will find chat on any friendship page. Messages send with Enter, and your friend gets a gentle notification, at most one per conversation until they have seen it, so an excited flurry of messages never floods anyone's bell.

Disappearing, with one careful exception

Disappearing messages have a known dark side: if someone behaves badly in chat, the evidence deletes itself. We built for that.

If you report a pen pal, Letter Trails freezes a snapshot of your current chat window into the report at that moment, before anything expires. That snapshot is visible to the moderation team only, never to other users, and it exists so that "they were harassing me in chat" is verifiable even after the messages themselves are gone. Good actors get ephemerality; bad actors do not get evidence destruction.

The usual protections apply on top: chat exists only inside an active friendship, blocking someone ends the friendship and the chat with it, and messages pass the same content rules as everything else on the platform.

What chat never does

• It never shares your address or phone number. Those move only through the two-key sharing panel.
• It never emails you. Notifications stay inside the app, on the bell.
• It never stores your messages beyond the window. There is no archive to leak, sell, or subpoena.

The privacy controls around it

Chat arrived alongside two account switches worth knowing about, both in your profile settings: pause new friend requests when your dance card is full (existing friendships are untouched), and hide yourself from the directory if you would rather correspond quietly with the pals you have. Between those, per-friendship sharing, and evaporating chat, the platform default is always the same: nothing about you is visible or permanent unless you choose it.

Chat is the margin note. The letter is the text. Find someone worth writing to, or join and see the whole system in one place.