Staying safe

A lot of apps offer three or four overlapping versions of “make this stop”, and people end up believing they have blocked somebody when they have only hidden them. That is a safety problem caused entirely by vocabulary, so there are two here and no more:

• Mute — not right now. The correspondence goes quiet, you keep every letter, and they can still write. Nobody is told.
• Block— not ever. They cannot write to you again, you disappear from each other’s Discover, and any letter of theirs still travelling towards you is stopped before it lands. Nobody is told.

Blocking is reversible from Settings → Blocked people. Unblocking opens the door from that moment on; it does not deliver anything that was stopped while the block was in place.

Declining a correspondence is “no thank you”. It ends the thread, the other person is told only that you are not writing back, and your reason stays private.

Reporting is “this person is a problem for people who are not me”. It blocks them and files the letter it is about, so somebody can read what actually happened rather than a summary of it. Reports are never shown to the person reported.

You can report from inside any letter or correspondence, via the menu in the top right. For anything urgent, write to tryletterway@gmail.com.

This is the part worth being specific about. When you set where you write from, you choose a place from a list. What other people can see is:

• Your country.
• The city you chose — and only if you have left Show my city on. You can turn it off, and you can choose a larger place than the one you actually live in.
• A rounded distance between you, in kilometres.
• A pin on a map that has been deliberately moved by up to about 25 km, so that the route drawn on a letter’s journey is roughly right and precisely wrong.

The coordinate used to work out how long a letter takes never leaves our servers, and no part of the app can ask for it. If you let the app check whether you have moved, the reading is compared and discarded — it is never stored and never sent to anybody.

• No presence. Nobody can see whether you are online, when you last opened the app, or whether you have the app open right now. There is no such thing here to show.
• No read timestamps. A sender can see that a letter was opened. They cannot see when, and opening one sends no notification.
• No photographs unless you agree to them. Nobody can send you an image out of the blue. It has to be asked for and granted, per correspondence, and not before you have written back at least once.

• You never need to give a pen pal your address, your telephone number, your workplace or your surname. A correspondence works perfectly without any of them.
• Anybody who asks you for money, however sympathetically, is running a scam. There are no exceptions to this and you should report them.
• If somebody wants to move the conversation to another app quickly, ask yourself why the slowness is a problem for them.
• If you are under 18, do not share photographs of yourself or agree to meet anybody.

We are a small team and we are not an emergency service. If you believe somebody is at immediate risk of harm, contact your local emergency services first, and then tell us at tryletterway@gmail.com so we can act on the account.

The rules everybody is held to are in House Rules, and what we do with your data is in our Privacy Policy.

One category of harm has its own page, because it has to be readable by people who are not members and quotable by people who are not us: Child safety standards sets out what is prohibited, how to report it, and what we do next.