Your journal lives
in your inbox
Dear Self is an AI-powered personal journal you interact with through email. Write what you feel. Ask what you wrote. Get back context, patterns, and reflection inside the inbox you already use.
Had a great conversation with Maya at work today. She mentioned that side project idea about local food maps again. I keep thinking about it. Maybe I should actually start.
How It Works
Three steps. No learning curve.
If you can send an email, you can use Dear Self. There is nothing to download, nothing to configure, and nothing to remember.
Write an email
Open your email app — Gmail, Outlook, whatever you use. Write to me@dearself.ai like you'd write to a friend. That's it. No formatting rules, no tags, no structure.
AI processes your entry
Our multi-agent system reads your message, identifies whether it's a journal entry, a question, or both. It stores your thoughts with semantic embeddings so nothing gets lost.
Get a reply in-thread
You receive a thoughtful response right in your email thread. It might surface a pattern you hadn't noticed, connect today's thoughts to something you wrote weeks ago, or simply reflect back what you said.
The Journey
It gets more valuable the longer you use it.
Most journals collect dust. Dear Self becomes your external memory.
It's a living archive that grows with you and works for you.
You start writing
You send your first email. It might be two lines about your morning or a full page about something that's been bothering you. Dear Self stores it, learns your voice, and replies with a welcome.
You start asking
"What did I say about changing jobs?" You send the question as an email. Dear Self searches your past entries using semantic understanding and sends back what you actually wrote.
It starts noticing
Dear Self connects the dots you didn't see. It notices that every Monday you mention feeling stuck, or that you keep coming back to the same idea. It reflects those patterns back, without judgment.
You have a history
Weekly summaries, personalized prompts when you've been quiet, and a searchable archive of everything you've thought. This isn't a journal you forget about, but one that remembers you.
What You Get
Built for people who think, not people who tinker.
Every feature is designed to stay out of your way while making your writing more useful over time.
Zero UI
No app, no dashboard, no login screen. Your email client is the interface. Write naturally, in the tool you already use every day.
Replies Like a Friend
Dear Self responds in-thread, acknowledging what you wrote, asking follow-ups, and connecting dots to previous entries. It feels like writing to someone who actually listens.
Search by Meaning
Ask "What have I said about my relationship with my dad?" and get results based on meaning, not keywords. Your journal becomes a searchable memory.
Encrypted End-to-End
Your entries are encrypted before they reach the database. Not even the system administrators can read what you write. Your thoughts stay yours.
Periodic Reflections
Weekly summaries, personalized prompts when you go quiet, and annual reports delivered to your inbox automatically.
Patterns You Miss
Over time, Dear Self notices recurring themes, moods, and ideas across your entries, and reflects them back to you. See yourself more clearly without any extra effort.
Privacy
Your thoughts are not our product.
We built Dear Self on a zero-trust architecture.
Because it's the only way a journal should work.
Encrypted at rest
Every journal entry is encrypted with AES-256 before it's stored. Even a full database leak would reveal nothing.
We can't read your data
Application-level encryption means your thoughts are opaque to the database, to our infrastructure, and to us.
Private network only
Database and cache run in a private VPC with no public access. All connections are TLS-encrypted end-to-end.
No passwords, no accounts
Authentication is based on your email address. There's no login, no password to leak, and no attack surface for credential theft.
Pricing
Start free. Upgrade when it matters.
The free tier is genuinely useful. The paid tiers unlock the features that make Dear Self a long-term companion.
Free
Start writing today. No credit card, no commitment.
- Unlimited journal entries via email
- AI-powered replies in-thread
- Personalized prompts when you go quiet
- Semantic search over your entries
- AES-256 encryption on all data
All-in-One
Everything. The full experience, no limits.
- Everything in Free
- Weekly reflection summaries
- Annual report (PDF)
- Multimedia support
- Priority AI processing (coming soon)
Common Questions
Everything you need to know about your new digital ink.
No. Dear Self lives entirely in your inbox. No downloads, no passwords, and no new apps to clutter your phone. If you can send an email, you can journal.
Absolutely. We use application-level AES-256 encryption. Your entries are encrypted before they even reach our database. Not even we can read them.
Yes. Dear Self is compatible with Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, Proton, and any other service that can send and receive email.
Never. We use the Google Gemini API for reflections. Per Google's enterprise terms, data sent via the API is not used to train their models.
Yes. You own your data. You can request a full export of your journaling history in a structured format at any time.
Your next journal entry is just an email away.
No signup form. No onboarding wizard. Send an email to me@dearself.ai and you're in. Write whatever's on your mind.