The sign-in page is mail.missionary.org, and it takes a Church Account — the missionary’s own. If you are the missionary, that is where your mail is, and the rest of this page is about getting it out before the account closes.
If you are a parent, that page will not open your missionary’s account and in almost every case you do not need it to. Their email belongs to them, the same way yours belongs to you, and the Church does not hand family members a key to it. What you are actually looking for is usually sitting in your own inbox already.
This question gets asked by three different people with three different problems, though, and only one of them has an easy answer. It is worth working out which one you are before you spend an evening on sign-in screens.
Which of these is you
You are a parent or family member and the weekly letters either are not arriving or arrived and you cannot find them. This is the common case and it is solvable in about ten minutes.
You are the missionary, recently home, and you want what is in the account before it closes. There is a deadline and it is shorter than people expect.
The mission is already over and the account has stopped letting anyone in. This looks like the worst case and usually is not, for a reason most families do not think of.
Where the letters actually live
Missionaries serving for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints write from an address the Church provides, and they read it at mail.missionary.org. Signing in there asks for a Church Account — the same credentials used for everything else the Church runs online — and it will only ever open the account belonging to whoever signs in. Your own Church Account opens your own; it does not open your missionary’s, and there is no family view, no parent login and no shared mailbox.
That sounds like a dead end and it is not, because of how the weekly letter works. When your missionary writes home on preparation day they send it to you. The copy you care about is therefore in your own email, under your own password, and it stays there whatever happens to the mission account afterwards. A parent searching for a way into mail.missionary.org is very often standing in front of a locked door with the thing they want already inside the house.
If the letters are not reaching you
Nine times out of ten the address simply is not on the list your missionary writes to. They keep that list themselves — typically as a group of addresses they paste into the weekly letter — and nobody is notified when somebody is missing from it. Ask them to add the address, and be specific about which one, because the address a parent uses for family mail is often not the one they first gave.
If the address is on the list and letters are still not arriving, work through these in order:
- Search your mail for the missionary’s address itself rather than their name. A letter sent to twenty people often arrives with a subject line nobody recognizes, and search by sender finds it when search by name does not.
- Check the spam folder, then check Promotions if you use Gmail’s tabs. A message sent to a large list of addresses is exactly what a spam filter is built to be suspicious of.
- Mark one as not spam and add the address to your contacts. That usually settles it permanently.
- If a letter is arriving for somebody else in the family but not for you, the list is the problem rather than the filter. Go back and ask again.
If you are the missionary, and the clock is running
The account the Church provided is not yours to keep. Access ends when you are released, and some months after that the account and everything in it is deleted. We are deliberately not printing a number here, because the number has changed before and a family that plans around it is a family that finds out it moved. Treat the window as shorter than whatever you have been told.
What goes when it goes is the part people underestimate. Letters you received are in that account only. So is your sent folder, which is the only record of what you actually wrote, as opposed to what your family happened to keep. If anything you want exists nowhere else, it exists there and nowhere else is exactly the problem.
Getting it out is free and takes about ten minutes of setting up. Sign in to the Church account at Google Takeout and export the mail, exactly as you would any other Gmail account — the steps are identical and they are written out in how to download every email from your missionary. Do it this week rather than after the homecoming, when there will be a great deal else going on.
If the account has already closed
Two things are worth trying, in this order, and the second one is the one that usually works.
Try signing in anyway
An account that has recently stopped working is not always gone. There is an extend-access option that appears at mail.missionary.org for a limited period after ordinary access ends, and a returned missionary who signs in may still find it. It costs five minutes to look, and if it is there it buys enough time to run the export.
Then ask the family
This is the part that saves most families, and it is why a closed account is rarely the disaster it looks like. Every weekly letter was sent to a list of people. Those copies are not in the mission account and never were — they are in a mother’s inbox, a grandparent’s, a sibling’s at college, a friend’s. They are complete, they still have the photographs attached, and no Church policy reaches them.
So the recovery is social rather than technical. Work out who was on the list, ask each of them to export their own mail, and put the exports together. One person almost always turns out to have kept everything.
If they are still out, do this now
Everything above is a recovery. If your missionary is still serving, the same work done today is not a recovery at all — it is five minutes that means none of this ever applies to you.
- Make sure every person who should get the weekly letter is on the list, including the ones who would never ask.
- Set up a Gmail filter so the letters label themselves as they arrive. Open one letter, click the three dots, choose Filter messages like these, and have it apply a label.
- Save any photographs shared as a link rather than attached, while the link still resolves. Shared albums break when the sharer changes accounts, which is what the end of a mission is.
- Check your own storage. A full Google account stops delivering mail, and the usual fix — sorting by size and deleting — finds precisely the letters with the pictures in them.
There is more on all four in keeping the letters safe while they’re still out and in what happens to missionary emails after the mission ends.
The whole thing in four lines
- You cannot sign in to somebody else’s mission account, and the letters you want are almost certainly in your own inbox already.
- If letters are not arriving, the address is usually missing from the weekly list rather than blocked by anything.
- A missionary coming home should export the Church account now, not later. The window is shorter than it sounds.
- A closed account is rarely the end of it. The family’s own copies are complete, and they are the ones worth collecting.