Profiles and the directory: how pen pals find each other

Every friendship on Letter Trails starts the same way: someone reads a profile and thinks, I want to hear from this person. Here is how profiles and the directory work, and how to make yours easy to say yes to.

What a profile shows

Your public profile is deliberately small:

• Display name and @username. The name is how people know you; the handle is your permanent address on the site (lettertrails.com/u/you). Choose the handle carefully, it can never be changed.
• A photo, if you like. Optional, always. A photo of you, your desk, your cat, your stationery drawer. Faces are not required for friendship.
• Country. Just the country, nothing finer.
• Bio and "looking for". The two text fields that do the real work. "Looking for" is your one-line personal ad: "a patient long-form writer anywhere in the world" tells people exactly whether you are their person.
• Interests, languages, letter pace. So people can find a match for how they actually write.
• Letters sent and received. Counts from the letter log. This is your track record: a profile with letters behind it says "I actually write" louder than any bio could.

What a profile never shows

Your email, your date of birth, your mailing address, and your phone number are never public, never on your profile, never in the directory. Addresses and numbers move only through mutual sharing inside a friendship. Your exact age is never displayed at all; we check that everyone is 18 or older at signup and keep the birthday to ourselves.

Using the directory

The directory is a browsable room of everyone open to new pen pals. Filter by country if you want mail from somewhere specific, by language if you write best in one tongue, by interest if you want a fellow gardener or poet, or search names and bios directly.

Two things worth knowing:

• It only shows people who want to be there. Anyone can hide from the directory or pause new requests, so everyone you see is genuinely findable on purpose.
• The activity signal is honest. The "letters sent" note on a card comes from logged letters, so it cannot be faked by clicking around.

Making your profile easy to say yes to

1. Write a "looking for" line. Cards with one get noticed; it is the first thing shown.
2. Say something concrete in your bio. "I press flowers and write about small town life" beats "I love letters."
3. Add the languages you genuinely write in, not every language you have met.
4. Log your letters so your track record shows.

Then send a request with a real note. Which is a whole art of its own, and exactly what the friend requests post covers.