No account · No app · Nothing to pay
Somebody would be glad
to hear from you.
Pick a card off the rack and write on the back. Email it to them, or take a link and send it however you like. No sign-up, no waiting. It turns up looking like something a person made, because it is.
What is on the rack
Several thousand original painted postcards, free to send. Every incorporated city and town in Washington and Oregon has its own card, along with Idaho, Nevada and California, and hundreds more places across the country and abroad. There are birthdays, holidays, thank yous and sympathy cards, and a good many of them move.
Some of the cards belong together, and those are gathered in collections: the Las Vegas set of ninety-nine resorts and the places that stood there before them, eighty-one landmarks, a hundred places in Nowhere that everybody has been and nobody can find on a map, and fifty vintage American towns that never existed.
How it works
Three steps, in this order, because the order is the whole thing.
Pick a card
Every card is ours, drawn for this rack. You can't upload your own, which is deliberate and keeps the place pleasant.
Write on the back
240 characters, same as a real card. The limit is the point. Short notes get written, long ones get abandoned.
Say who it is from
Put your name on it, then email it to them or take a link and send it yourself. Either way they get a link to open the card, not the words you wrote.
Today
A card from Henry, every day. Today's is above, with the last seven under it. Miss one by more than a week and it comes round again next year.
Why it's free
The cards are free and they stay free. No account, and we don't sell anybody's address to anybody.
The novels at the bottom of the page help pay for it. If you send a card and never buy a book, that's fine. That was always the deal.
Cards are held for 60 days and then they're gone. We keep what we need to stop people misusing this, and nothing else.
And how we keep it decent
- No links in messages, ever. Web addresses, emails and phone numbers get stripped out of every message. There's nothing here worth a spammer's time.
- Every card gets checked. No robots, no scripts, no bulk anything.
- The message stays off the inbox. Recipients get a link, not the note, so nothing can be shoved in front of anyone.
- One click and it stops. Anyone can block this site from ever mailing them again, permanently, no questions.
- Ten cards a day. Plenty for a birthday list, useless to anyone with a mailing list.
So. Who is it going to be?
Las Vegas, then and now. Ninety-nine cards: the resorts standing today, and fifty that were demolished. The vintage fifty are also a book, with the history of what happened on each site. Painted Postcards: Las Vegas, What Was Here Before, 1941 to 2025.
Pick a card
No uploads, no custom images. Everything here is from our own library, which is the first thing that keeps this site from being useful to spammers.
Write it
240 characters, same as a real card. Links, email addresses and phone numbers are stripped out before anything is stored.
postcardsbyemail.com
STAMP
NEEDED
How shall we send it?
Email it to them, or take a link and pass it on yourself.
It's on its way.
Anyone who has the link can open the card, so paste it where you would say the thing in person. It works for 60 days.
Your message isn't in that email. It waits behind the link, which is why cards feel like something to open rather than something to skim. The card stays there for 60 days.
Not arrived in a few minutes? Ask them to check their spam folder.