For eighteen months or two years, a letter arrives every week. Then the mission ends, and most families assume the letters are simply still there — in the inbox, where they have always been. Usually they are. But there are five quite ordinary ways a family loses some or all of them, and every one of them is easier to prevent than to undo.
None of this is unusual or anybody’s fault. It is what happens when a two-year correspondence is stored across half a dozen private inboxes, one of which is on a deadline nobody set and nobody is reminded of.
The mission account closes
Missionaries write from an address the Church provides, and that account belongs to the mission rather than to the missionary. When they are released, access to it ends, and some months after that the account and its contents are deleted.
What that does and does not take matters. Letters your missionary sent to youare in your inbox, and they are yours — the mission account closing does not reach into your Gmail. What goes is anything that lived only in that account: their sent folder, letters to people who have since deleted them, and any drafts or notes they kept there.
We deliberately do not print a number of days here. It has been described as ninety, with a short extension window after it, but the figure has moved before and a family that plans around it is a family that finds out it moved again. Treat the window as shorter than whatever you have been told, and the question stops mattering.
If the account has already stopped letting anyone in, it is still worth signing in to look for an extend-access option, which appears for a limited period after ordinary access ends. There is more on that, and on what to do when it is genuinely gone, in how to get into your missionary’s email.
The letters you wrote back
This is the half that almost nobody thinks about until it is gone, and it is the half that cannot be reconstructed from anywhere else.
Every week somebody at home wrote back. Those replies were sent tothe mission account, which means they are sitting in exactly one place: an inbox on a deletion timer. Your own sent folder has your side of it, which is something — but a conversation is two people, and what you have is one of them talking.
The same is true of your missionary’s sent folder from the other direction. It is the only record of what was actually written, as opposed to what happened to be kept. If a letter went to a friend who has since deleted it, the sent folder is the last copy in existence.
If your missionary is home, or close to it, this is the first thing to rescue and the easiest to forget, because from the family’s side nothing appears to be missing at all.
The inbox fills up, and the tidying begins
A free Google account shares its storage between Gmail, Drive and Photos. When it fills, Google stops delivering new mail until space is made, and the usual response is a sort-by-size purge — which finds exactly the messages with large attachments. Those are the letters with the photographs in them.
Deleted mail sits in Trash for thirty days and is then gone. There is no recovery after that, for anyone, including Google support.
How to check, and what to do instead
Open your Google storage page and look at the figure rather than guessing at it. Most people are surprised either way: some have been near the limit for a year, and some have been deleting for no reason.
- Under about eighty percent. Nothing to do. Leave it alone and come back in six months.
- Over eighty percent, mission still running. Buy the smallest paid tier. It costs less than a sandwich a month and it removes the pressure that causes the deleting. This is genuinely the cheapest insurance in this entire article.
- Full, and mail has stopped arriving. Do not sort by size. Clear space out of Drive and Photos instead, or pay for the tier for a month while you export. The large messages are the ones you came here to protect.
Photographs that were never really sent
A missionary with a slow connection often shares pictures as a link — a Google Photos album, a Dropbox folder, a WeTransfer that expired two weeks later. The letter is safe. The link in it points at something that may not exist any more, and a link is not a photograph.
How long you have depends entirely on what was used, and the differences are large:
- WeTransfer expires in days. If a mission used it at all, assume those pictures are already gone unless somebody downloaded them at the time.
- Google Photos shared albumssurvive until the sharing account changes or closes — which is exactly what the end of a mission is. These are the ones to save first, because they usually hold the most.
- Dropbox and OneDrive links last as long as the account and the folder do, and quietly break when either is reorganized.
- iCloud shared albums are tied to an Apple account and to a device, and do not come out in a Google export at all.
In every case the fix is the same and it is boring: open the link, use the download-all option, and put the actual files somewhere of your own. Do it while the mission is running rather than afterwards. There is more on sorting what comes out in how to organize a mission’s worth of photographs.
The family member who forwarded everything
In a lot of families one person receives the letter and forwards it to everybody else. It works beautifully until you want the originals: a forwarded message carries the forwarder’s formatting, sometimes drops the attachments, and always carries the date it was forwarded rather than the date it was written.
That last one causes more damage than it sounds like it should. A forwarded archive sorted by date is in the order somebody got round to forwarding things, which is not the order the mission happened in. Weeks land in the wrong months and a batch forwarded in one sitting all lands on the same day.
If that is your family, the complete copy is on one person’s account. Ask them for it, and ask before the phone gets replaced.
What genuinely cannot be undone
Most of this article is about things that are recoverable if you move. It is only fair to be straight about the ones that are not, so that nobody spends two weeks on a support ticket that was never going to work.
- Mail deleted more than thirty days ago is gone. Google does not keep a deeper copy and support cannot retrieve it.
- A deleted Church mission account is gone, and there is no family appeal process for its contents.
- An expired file-transfer link cannot be revived. The file was removed from the service, not hidden.
- Photographs that only ever existed on a phone that was lost or wiped are gone unless they were backed up — though it is always worth checking whether backup was quietly on the whole time.
What is almost never truly lost, and what families give up on far too early, is the weekly letter itself. It went to several people. Somebody still has it.
What to do about it
- Export your own mail now rather than at the homecoming. It is free and it takes about ten minutes — here is how. An export is a file on your computer that no policy change can reach.
- Ask anyone else who receives letters to do the same, before the mission ends rather than after.
- Save shared albums as actual files while the links still resolve.
- Check your Google storage. If it is near full, buy the smallest paid tier for a few months rather than deleting to make room.
If the homecoming is in the next few weeks
Do these in this order. The first two are the ones with a deadline on them; the rest will keep.
- Have your missionary export the Church account before they are released, or as soon as possible afterwards. This is the only item here that becomes impossible rather than merely harder.
- Have them save any shared photo albums to actual files, from the account that shared them, while that account still works.
- Export your own inbox. No deadline, but you are already in the right frame of mind.
- Send one message to everyone else on the weekly list asking them to do the same. Say why, because most people will not realize their copy is the only one of anything.
- Put every export in one folder, backed up somewhere that is not the computer it was downloaded to.
None of this requires deciding what you eventually want to do with the letters. It only means that when you decide, they will still be there.