Privacy Policy

Last updated: October 21, 2026

Dear Patience is operated by Rootstock Lab LLC (“we”, “us”, “our”). This policy describes the personal data we hold and how we use it.

1. What We Collect

When you sign up for Dear Patience, we collect:

• Your name — shown as the sender of your letters and invitations.
• Your real email address — used to sign you in and to deliver your letters.
• Your chosen username — your Dear Patience address (e.g. you@dearpatience.com).

When you use the Service, we also hold:

• The letters you send and receive, including subject lines and text, as Message Storage below describes.
• A record of your correspondence: who wrote to whom and when, the invitations you send (including the addresses you invite), and your settings for each correspondence.
• If you have had a paid plan, your Stripe customer and subscription identifiers and the subscription’s status.
• Technical records, such as the IP address and time of each sign-in, which we keep for a short period, and server logs of the addresses on the mail we handle (not the text of letters).

Who can see your details. The people you write to or invite may see your name and your real email address. Someone who writes to you or invites you first does not see your real email address until you answer them.

If you don’t have an account. If you correspond with someone on Dear Patience without an account, we hold your email address, any name you give, a Dear Patience address we make for you so that replies can reach you, your letters while they travel, and whether you have asked us to stop writing to you. We keep this until you ask us to delete it (see Your Rights).

2. How We Use Your Data

We use your data solely to operate the Service:

• Authenticate you via one-time email codes.
• Route and delay letters between you and the people you write to.
• Send you transactional notifications (e.g. “your letter is on its way”).
• Enforce our limits against abuse, and check that a letter really comes from the address it claims.
• Run the paid plan, if you have one.

We do not sell your personal data or use it for advertising.

3. Message Storage

A letter’s subject and text are stored on our servers until it is delivered, and then deleted. A letter that isn’t delivered — because the recipient has stopped it, or because we couldn’t confirm it came from its sender — is deleted too. If we can’t deliver a letter, we keep its subject and text for a limited time, so that we can look into the failure and send it again, and then delete them. We keep a record that each letter was sent — who wrote to whom, and when — for as long as the account it belongs to exists.

Copies outside our database. Our email provider keeps a copy of the messages it handles, including their content, and we keep database backups, each for a short period. Something we have deleted may remain in these copies until they expire.

We read the text of a letter only when we have to: to deliver it, to look into a delivery failure or a report of abuse, and where the law requires. We do not read letters to improve the Service or for advertising.

4. Who We Share Data With

We share data only with the service providers we need to operate Dear Patience:

• Our hosting and database provider — stores your data, runs sign-in, and handles your letters.
• Our email provider — sends and receives all our email, including letters, notifications and sign-in codes.
• Stripe — payments for the paid plan. Stripe receives your email address and collects your payment details directly; we never see or store your card details. Stripe keeps its own payment records.
• Our website host — serves this website. Your letters do not pass through it.

Mail you send to our own addresses, such as support@ and privacy@, is forwarded to the mailbox of the person who runs Dear Patience at Rootstock Lab.

We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal data to anyone.

5. Data Security

We use industry-standard measures to protect your data, including encrypted connections and restricted access to our systems. However, no system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

6. Your Rights

If you have an account, you may:

• Request a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
• Ask us to correct inaccurate data.
• Delete your account, which removes your profile, your letters and your correspondence records. Some data remains for a short time or for a specific reason: records we keep against abuse, copies outside our database (see Message Storage), and Stripe’s own payment records. We also keep the Dear Patience addresses that were yours, with nothing linking them to you, so that nobody else can take them and receive letters meant for you.

If you don’t have an account, you may ask us for a copy of what we hold about you, or ask us to delete it. If you have asked us to stop writing to you, we keep your address with that instruction, so that we don’t write to you again.

To exercise any of these rights, email us at privacy@dearpatience.com.

7. Cookies and Tracking

Dear Patience does not use tracking cookies or third-party analytics. We use browser local storage only to maintain your login session.

Do Not Track. We don’t track you across other websites or let third parties do so, so we don’t respond differently to Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signals.

8. Children’s Privacy

The Service is only for adults aged 18 or older. We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 18. If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 18, we will close it and delete their data. If you believe someone under 18 has given us personal information, please contact us at privacy@dearpatience.com and we will delete it.

9. Changes to This Policy

We may update this policy from time to time. If we make material changes, we will notify you by email before they take effect. A change that would let us use data we already hold in a materially different way from what this policy said when we collected it will apply to that data only if you agree to it.

10. Contact

Questions about your privacy? Reach us at privacy@dearpatience.com.