Communicating Building An E-Mail Time Capsule David M. Ewalt, 10.24.05, 9:00 AM ET

From Oct. 24, 2005 to Nov. 30, 2005, Forbes.com will collect thousands of letters that our readers have written to themselves. And we'll deliver them up to 20 years later. Preserving a physical time capsule is simple: just shove it in the dirt and forget about it. But the process gets a lot more complicated when you're trying to store something digitally. Simply scheduling an e-mail for future delivery is pretty easy--just a matter of writing it and setting a send date in the future. Some e-mail clients will do it for you, and small Web sites like futureme.org will take over the task as well. But once your message is written and waiting to be sent, all kinds of things can happen to prevent delivery, particularly if you're going to be waiting for decades.
Click here to e-mail yourself in the future