Your account, your rules: pausing, privacy switches, and deleting

A pen pal platform holds unusually personal things: where you live, how to reach you, photographs of words you wrote by hand. So the account controls are built around one principle: you can always turn it off. Here is the full list of switches and what each one does.

Pause new friend requests

Life gets busy, and five active pen pals is already a lot of stationery. Flip off "Open to new friend requests" in your profile settings and the request form disappears from your profile; anyone visiting simply sees that you are not taking new pen pals right now. Nothing else changes: your existing friendships, chats, and letters continue exactly as before. Flip it back whenever your dance card clears.

Hide from the directory

The second switch removes you from directory browsing entirely. People who already have your profile link can still see your (public-only) profile, but nobody discovers you by scrolling. Combined with paused requests, this is a full quiet mode: correspond with the pals you have, invisible to everyone else, losing nothing.

Notifications stay in the app

Letter Trails does not email you about activity. Friend requests, arriving letters, wall approvals, chat nudges all land on the bell in the header and nowhere else. Your inbox stays yours; the only emails we ever send are the account kind (verification and password reset). Checking Letter Trails is something you do when you feel like it, which is rather the spirit of the whole hobby.

What is locked, and why

One thing you cannot change: your @username. It is your permanent address on the site, other people's letters and memories attach to it, and we say so clearly before you pick it. Display name, photo, bio, and everything else can change as often as you like.

Deleting your account

If you leave, you leave completely. At the bottom of your account page, type your username to confirm and deletion is immediate and total:

• profile, photo, and directory presence
• all friendships and friend requests
• your entire letter log and chat history
• every wall photo you posted or approved, removed from the wall and from storage
• your encrypted address and phone number

No soft delete, no thirty day limbo, no "deactivated" ghost profile. The only trace kept is an anonymous audit note that an account was deleted, with nothing personal in it.

Before you reach for that button though: deletion also erases your letter history and your pen pals' shared photos with you. If what you actually need is a breather, the two switches above give you complete invisibility while keeping every letter logged and every friendship intact. Most people who need a break need quiet, not erasure.

The pattern behind all of it

Every control follows the same rule as address sharing and disappearing chat: visible only by choice, reversible at will, gone when you say gone. Paper friendships deserve that.

New here? Start writing, or read how to find your first pen pal.