About

A place for deliberate correspondence

oorb exists to restore something to writing that instant messaging took out of it: the time. A letter is worth what was spent on it, and none of the three things below can be done in a hurry or by an algorithm.

The Hearth · nothing is kept

Write the letter you will never send — or speak it, if it is the kind of thing that is easier said — and cast it into the fire. It comes apart on screen and there is nothing left anywhere to delete: no draft on a server, no row in a table, no copy in an inbox, and no recording anywhere but the tab it was made in.

Overtures · a letter to a stranger

The other half does the reverse, and says so plainly. Choose an overture, write in full, and the letter goes to one signed-in stranger — drawn at random from the people who have confirmed an email address here. Nobody signs up to be written to, and nobody is chosen for what they wrote or who they are. It is stored, because it has to be delivered and because you should both be able to read it again in a year.

Neither of you sees the other’s email address, ever. A letter arrives signed with a face and the name that goes with it — never your username, and never your address. If the stranger answers, the answer appears on your account page.

One answer is where it ends, unless you both decide otherwise. If they answer, you can ask them for a while of talking — between 12 and 72 hours, drawn when you ask, and neither of you picks it — and they are asked: nothing opens unless they say yes, and saying nothing is a complete answer to it. Only the person who wrote the letter can ask, because the person who answered it already said their piece and did not sign up to be reachable. After that it closes on its own and everything said in it is destroyed. The letter and the answer stay; the conversation does not.

Gifts · written by a person

Sometimes the words are owed to someone specific and will not come. Tell us what you feel and who it is for, and somebody here writes the letter by hand. Not a template, and not a machine — a person reads what you wrote and answers it in ink.

• Digital copy₹199The finished letter, by email, exactly as it was written.
• Printed and posted₹299Set and printed on bond paper, sent in an envelope. We ask where to post it once you ask for it.

Both are ordinary post and ordinary time. A short deadline or speed post costs more, and we tell you what it comes to before a word is written.

On a phone

The oorb app carries the same three things and makes the same promises. The Hearth there issues no network request either; a gift is still asked for on this website, because it takes the email address of somebody who is not you, and a phone is the wrong place to be asked for one.

What this site does not do

There is no analytics, no advertising, no tracking pixel and no profiling. The only cookie is the one that signs you in. Reading this page contacts no other company at all — nothing on it is fetched from anywhere else, so no third party is in a position to watch you read it.

There is also no payment gateway, and no card field anywhere on the site. A gift is settled with a person afterwards, and nothing about how you paid is stored here.

Our promise

Technology should carry what a person meant to say, not measure them for having said it. Your words are yours. The parts of this site that keep nothing keep nothing, and the parts that must keep something say exactly what and for how long — which is the only version of that promise worth making.