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Write An Email To Yourself - Have It Delivered 20 Years Later |
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Written by Wire Services
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Monday, 07 November 2005 |
Beginning on October 24, 2005 and ending on November 30, 2005, Forbes.com is collecting thousands of letters that their readers have written to themselves. And they'll deliver them up to 20 years later.
According to Forbes.com, preserving a physical time capsule is simple: just shove it in the dirt and forget about it. But the process gets a lot more complicated when you're trying to store something digitally.
Simply scheduling an e-mail for future delivery is pretty easy--just a matter of writing it and setting a send date in the future. Some e-mail clients will do it for you, and small Web sites like futureme.org will take over the task as well. But once your message is written and waiting to be sent, all kinds of things can happen to prevent delivery, particularly if you're going to be waiting for decades.
You could protect the data on some physical medium, like a CD, or magnetic tape. But we're not just storing messages in a box. We're saving e-mails, so we need the messages online, along with a mechanism to actually send them.
Taking into consideration several possibilities including whether Forbes.com will still be operating 20 years in the future (a remote possibility but there all the same), Forbes has recruited two partners to help assure the future delivery of your email time capsules.
Codefix Consulting is a Sleepy Hollow, NY-based technology consultancy. Codefix president, Garrison Hoffman wrote the actual email time capsule application and designed the database that will store the messages. The second partner is Yahoo! simply because this Internet giant is expected to survive and embrace future technological changes that will occur over the next 20 years.
What if you're using a different e-mail address in five, ten, or 20 years? Well, if that happens, you're not getting your message. But you can help improve the chances of delivery success by e-mailing yourself at a personal account, one operated by a major Internet company, or a job you expect to hold for a while. Don't send the message to your work address if you're planning to leave in a few months.
The complete article can be read HERE
You can compose a time capsule email to yourself by going HERE , but the experiment is almost over. Forbes will be sealing the project on November 30. |
