Receiving submissions via email: Our Memory Book

Contributors can submit memories by sending an email, just like writing to a friend.

How it works

Each book with email enabled gets a unique inbound email address.
Contributors send an email to that address with their memory in the body and optional photo attachments.
The submission appears in your moderation queue.

Enabling email submissions

Open your book's Channels page and flip the Email switch. Email stays off by default; it requires a book code and an explicit opt-in. Once enabled, the inbound email address appears on your book's sharing page.

What contributors can send

The email body becomes the submission text (email signatures are automatically stripped).
Image attachments (up to 20 MB each) are saved as submission media.
The email subject line is used for book code routing, not as part of the submission.

Channel features

No session persistence: each email is treated as an independent submission. Contributors include the book code every time.
Contributor identity: the sender's email address is captured automatically.
Duplicate protection: if the same email is delivered more than once (e.g., webhook retry), only one submission is created.
Rate limit: 20 emails per hour per sender address, plus 60 per hour per book from any one sending domain (for example, all of a book's Gmail contributors together). The second limit exists to stop a flood of look-alike addresses from one domain. Emails over either limit are never lost: they are held and delivered once the next hour's budget opens, and they only ever hold back other emails to the same book from the same domain. Held emails are worked through oldest first, and other senders' emails keep flowing around them. A busy launch or a photo burst from a large family on one email provider can bump into it; if that happens, memories arrive over the following hours rather than all at once.
Interviews: if your book uses the guided interview by default, email contributors are interviewed too, but only while email is switched on for the book. With email off, every email gets the generic auto-reply and nothing is started.
No commands: email is prose, not chat. Chat keywords such as HELP or START mean nothing as an email address; only your book's own inbound address routes a message, and anything else is silently ignored.
Auto-reply privacy: because an email's "From" address can't be verified the way a phone number can, every automated reply that doesn't confirm a successful submission uses one generic message that never names your book. An email sent to an address that doesn't match any book gets no reply at all. Our automated replies come from a no-reply address: contributors should always write a fresh email to the book address rather than replying to one of ours. For the same reason a book code can never be one of our own sender names, such as NOREPLY.

Tips

Include the email address in your sharing message for contributors who prefer email over web forms.
Email works well for longer, more thoughtful memories; contributors can write at their own pace.
Every email submission asks the sender to click a verification link before it can be reviewed or published, no matter which verification setting your book uses, and that includes emails you send to your own book: an email's "From" address can be forged, so the link is the only proof the sender actually controls that inbox.
Apple Live Photos: attach both the still and its .MOV file to the same email to keep the motion; see sharing Live Photos.