It's the question we hear most often, and it's a fair one. You're writing a letter meant to outlast you, meant to reach someone years or decades from now. What happens if Dear Forward doesn't? This is the most important question we can answer, so here it is directly: your letters will still be delivered. We've structured Dear Forward specifically so that your letters are legally protected and independently held, even if the company ceases to exist. Your letters are held in attorney-backed escrow, meaning they're in the custody of independent legal professionals who have a binding obligation to fulfill delivery regardless of what happens to Dear Forward. Your digital copies are encrypted and backed up. Your printed copies are on archival paper engineered to last centuries. And annual confirmations ensure that delivery information stays current. In short: we've removed the company from the equation. Your words matter more than our business status.
What Does Attorney-Backed Escrow Actually Protect?
When you write a letter with Dear Forward, copies of your encrypted letter are placed in escrow with a licensed attorney or escrow agent. This is a legal arrangement — an escrow agreement — that gives the escrow holder independent authority and obligation to safeguard your letter and fulfill delivery instructions. You're not relying on Dear Forward's servers alone. You're relying on a licensed professional with fiduciary duty.
Here's what that means in practical terms: if Dear Forward were to shut down tomorrow, the escrow agent would still have a legal obligation to deliver your letters on the specified dates. They would still have access to the encrypted copies we've placed with them. They would still have your delivery instructions on file. No bankruptcy court, no asset liquidation, no "sorry, all data was lost" scenario changes that legal obligation. The escrow agent's job is to act as an impartial custodian and ensure your wishes are honored. It's the same mechanism that protects house sales, lawsuit settlements, and other important transactions where both parties need assurance that a neutral third party is holding something of value.
What About My Encrypted Backups?
Beyond the escrow arrangement, we maintain encrypted backups of every letter in geographically distributed storage. These backups exist independently of our primary servers, so even if our core infrastructure failed, the backups would remain intact. Each backup is encrypted with the same AES-256 standard, meaning the data is useless without the decryption keys — which are themselves stored securely and separately.
This redundancy serves an important purpose: if Dear Forward were to shut down, the escrow agent could access these backups to recover and print any letters that hadn't yet been delivered. The decryption keys would be provided to the escrow agent as part of the legal agreement, ensuring they could retrieve and print your letters even if Dear Forward's active systems were offline. Your letter isn't trapped in any single company database. It exists in multiple encrypted copies, held by independent parties, with multiple paths to recovery.
How Do Annual Confirmations Protect You If Something Happens?
Every year, we reach out to you to confirm that your delivery instructions are still accurate and current. If you become unreachable, move, or your circumstances change, we have the opportunity to know about it. But there's another layer to this: if Dear Forward shut down before your delivery date, the escrow agent would also conduct confirmations to verify current contact information before printing and mailing your letters.
This means your letter doesn't get sent to an address you haven't lived at for years, or to someone you've lost touch with. The confirmation process ensures that even in a worst-case scenario, the people handling delivery have verified, recent information. It's a safeguard that protects both the letter and the recipient.
What If I'm Still Worried About the Digital Service Aspect?
That's exactly why we use physical archival paper. The ultimate protection for your letter isn't digital infrastructure at all — it's the paper it's printed on. ISO 9706 archival paper is engineered to last 100+ years under proper storage conditions. It doesn't require servers, passwords, or cloud backups. It's a physical object, independent of any technology. Once your letter is printed on this paper and placed in climate-controlled storage, its preservation no longer depends on Dear Forward's business success.
Think of it this way: even if every digital system failed, the printed letter is still there. It's still real. It's still readable. It's still protected by archival storage standards used by the Library of Congress and major institutions worldwide. The digital layer is just a convenient way to write, store temporarily, and manage delivery instructions. But the thing that actually matters — the letter itself — is a physical artifact designed for permanence.
What Would Actually Happen If Dear Forward Closed?
Let's walk through the actual scenario: Dear Forward would notify customers and escrow agents immediately. The escrow agent would take over all remaining delivery responsibilities. They would access the encrypted backups and decryption keys we've provided. For any letters with upcoming delivery dates, they would retrieve the digital copies, decrypt them, and print them on archival paper according to the original specifications. They would verify current contact information through our annual confirmation system. And they would mail the letters on the correct dates to the correct addresses.
For letters in long-term archival storage waiting for future delivery dates, the escrow agent would continue storing them in climate-controlled facilities until delivery dates arrive. For letters in physical storage, nothing would change — they'd simply remain in their climate-controlled environment under the escrow agent's custody instead of Dear Forward's oversight.
No letters would be lost. No deliveries would be missed. The only difference would be that the escrow agent would be managing the process instead of Dear Forward — and from the recipient's perspective, they would just get a letter they were expecting, perhaps with slightly different handling behind the scenes.
This Is About More Than Business Security
We've designed Dear Forward this way because we believe letters deserve more than the typical "we promise to stay in business" reassurance that most services offer. Your legacy letter deserves structural guarantees. It deserves to be legally protected. It deserves to exist in forms beyond any single company's control. That's why escrow, archival paper, encryption, and annual confirmations all matter. They work together to ensure that your letter's delivery doesn't depend on our survival.
If you've been hesitating to write your letter because of these concerns, we hope this clarity helps. Your words are too important to be trapped by business risk. We've built Dear Forward to be trustworthy not through promises, but through structures that make promises unnecessary.