Messages

Homeward has built-in messaging so donors, missionaries, and organizations can reach each other without sharing email addresses or phone numbers. Conversations happen between mailboxes, and messages never reveal your personal contact details.

Open Dashboard → Messages to read and send. The envelope button in the sidebar footer also takes you there, and shows a badge with the number of conversations that have unread messages.

Your mailbox

Your personal mailbox is created automatically with your account — there is nothing to set up.

If you belong to an organization, you may also have access to its shared mailboxes (an organization can operate up to four, such as “General Inquiries” or “Prayer Team”). Everyone the organization adds as a member can read and send from a shared mailbox. When you write a message, you choose which mailbox you are sending from; your personal mailbox is the default.

Organization mailboxes

An organization’s mailboxes are managed from the organization’s dashboard. The organization owner owns every mailbox it creates — up to four. Other people only gain access when they are added by name, and only staff listed on the organization’s roster can be added. Each mailbox card shows its owner, its conversation count, and who currently has additional access.

Contacting someone

Every profile page you can see shows a Contact button, as long as the person or organization behind it has a Homeward account. If you can view the profile, you can write to it — there is no separate approval step.

You must be signed in to send. If you are not, the Contact button asks you to sign in or create an account, and brings you back to finish your message.
Every new conversation needs a subject, which becomes its title in both mailboxes. Anyone in the conversation can rename it later.
Messages are plain text, up to 1,600 characters, with up to five attachments.

Unclaimed directory profiles — entries with no account behind them — have no mailbox to receive into, so they do not show a Contact button.

Email notifications

Homeward does not email you for every message. Instead, a daily digest lists conversations with unread messages — and only goes out when there is actually something unread. Turn the digest on or off per mailbox in your messaging settings.

Archiving a conversation

Archive tidies your inbox without deleting anything. An archived conversation moves to your Archived view and stays fully readable.

Archiving only affects your own mailbox — the other person’s view is unchanged.
If a new message arrives, the conversation returns to your inbox automatically. Archive means “done for now,” not “gone.”

Archived conversations also stay out of your unread count. If a new message arrives in an archived thread, it unarchives, returns to your inbox, and counts as unread again.

Deleting a message

You can delete any message you sent:

If it is the latest message in the conversation, it is removed completely — no trace remains for anyone.
If there are later messages, its content and attachments are permanently destroyed and both sides see “This message was deleted” in its place.

Deletion is immediate and permanent — the content is destroyed, not hidden, and cannot be restored. In a shared organization mailbox, only the person who wrote a message can delete it.

Deleting a conversation

Once every message in a conversation has been deleted, either participant can delete the conversation itself. This removes it from Homeward entirely, for both sides — unlike archiving, which only hides it from your own view.

How long messages are kept

Nothing in Homeward messaging is kept forever. Every message expires.

Your retention period. Each mailbox has a retention setting that applies to the messages it sends: 1, 3, or 6 months, 1 year, or 2 years (the default). Change it in your messaging settings. For organization mailboxes, only mailbox managers can change it.

Shorter for one message. When writing a message, the stopwatch button lets you choose a shorter period for that message only — it can tighten your default, never extend it.

What happens at expiry. A message expires at its send time plus its retention period. At that moment it disappears from view for both sides, shown as a deleted message. A weekly cleanup then permanently removes expired messages — content and attachments — from Homeward’s systems. If that empties a conversation, the conversation is removed too. Changing your setting later does not affect messages already sent.

Phantom messages

For something that should not linger at all, switch on Phantom when writing a message:

A phantom message expires 24 hours after the recipient reads it — and no later than 7 days after sending, even if it is never read.
Phantom is a per-message choice. It switches off again after every send.
Phantom messages work only in one-to-one conversations between two personal mailboxes — not with organization mailboxes.

If an account is removed

Conversations are never destroyed by someone leaving. If an account is removed, its mailbox is closed — nobody can read it, including the profile’s managers — but the people they wrote to keep their side of every exchange. If the same person later reconnects an account to their profile, their mailbox returns with its history intact. Closed mailboxes’ messages still expire on their normal schedule.

Privacy

Messaging never exposes your email address or other contact details.
Who can message you follows exactly who can see your profile.
Deletion and expiry are real: destroyed content and attachments are removed from Homeward’s storage, not merely hidden from view.