Ask HN: How to send a message to someone 20 years into the future?

I decided a priori to stick with email, both because I can't imagine email going away anytime soon, and also because sending an email two main benefits: (1) the content is plain text, and should remain easily readable at the destination, and (2) you get automatic "backups" in your own Sent folder.

I also wanted to avoid any free services because there's no guarantee they'll stick around, or in the case of something like Gmail, keep the account around unused. And, although I'm a really happy paying Fastmail customer for many years, a new email address on my account felt a bit _too_ expensive for just this purpose (especially since I'll eventually pay for an actual address for them).

Because I already pay $5/month for a tiny Linode instance for other purposes, I decided to self-host. Because I don't plan on having the account send any emails (the hard part of self-hosting), setup was relatively pain-free with Postfix. It took a bit of configuration and testing, but I now have an email account for my little one hosted on a subdomain which reliably receives email and stores it in plain-text on the server. Because I set things up in the Maildir format, in the future, it should be simple to also run Dovecot to provide an IMAP interface to actually get at the emails, or import them elsewhere.

I ran into a bunch of pain points throughout the learning process here that I can share, but don't have a reason to believe you'll run into them too, so I don't want to overwhelm. More than happy to get into the specifics of any part of the process if you want!

My plan is to keep it entirely organic — so far have I've only really sent a few emails around the more meaningful-feeling milestones. (Arriving home, one week, etc.) I think, long-term, I'd prefer to have the amount of content not feel _overwhelming_ when I hand it off; I'm not planning on having this be the primary way to document my kid's life, but as something "extra" to be able to pass off to them.

[Also, being a few weeks in: I'd warn against making any plans for the first few weeks assuming you'll have much brain capacity available to you. I'd say, don't stress yourself out too much if you can avoid it.]

I know this isn’t exactly what you were asking for — apologies please let me suggest changing your goal slightly to try and give your kid a message every year, not just all at once at twenty. More than that let me suggest you do this activity with your kid and not alone.

I’ve seen my child change so fast and I promise you they would rather have gifts and thoughts from you each year then in a big pile at the end. You will also know them much better five years from now (and ten and fifteen) so the letter will mean more to them because of what you know to put in it.

That said, you can still be clever with time! Every year you could write a letter to open in 1, 3, 5 and 10 years so a fifteen year old could have letters from several different times. Don’t forget to include pictures of you and your kid in each one and messages from the kid themselves. They will love it.

It turns out kids just want you to be with them. Use this as a way to be with them.

And lastly, if that suggestion doesn’t feel like enough to you, consider writing a journal about your life and write some of the more personal messages to them there instead. We can’t predict when our kid will want to know us as people better, but it’s probably well into adulthood. When that happens they won’t want advice as much as wanting to know you and all your dreams and struggles.

Good luck and congratulations!