Your family will find paper letters and photo albums in a drawer. Digital ones, they won't. An email password, a phone passcode, two-factor codes sent to a number that gets cancelled a few months later — and access to a whole life disappears.
Here is how the most popular services handle it, and what is worth doing today.
Telegram: the account deletes itself
Telegram has no way to pass an account to heirs. Instead, it self-destructs: if you don't log in for a long time, the account is deleted along with all cloud messages, media and contacts. According to the Telegram FAQ, by default this happens after 18 months without logging in, and you can change the period in your privacy settings.
Secret chats live only on the participants' devices, so without the phone they cannot be recovered at all.
Google: Gmail, Photos, Drive
Google offers Inactive Account Manager. You choose how long the account must be inactive before your plan runs, and up to 10 people who will receive an email from you and, if you wish, a link to download selected data.
Without a plan, Google reserves the right to delete an account that has been inactive for at least 2 years. Photos and emails can simply vanish.
Facebook and Instagram
After death, a profile can be memorialised — it stays, but nobody can log in. On Facebook you can name a legacy contact in advance: this person manages the memorialised profile (for example, pins a post or updates the photo) but cannot read your messages. Or you can choose to have the account deleted.
Apple: iCloud and iPhone
Apple offers Legacy Contact. The person you choose can access photos, notes, files and backups — but only with an access key you create in advance, plus a death certificate. Access lasts 3 years, after which the account is deleted. Keychain passwords and purchased films or music are not passed on.
What to do today
- Set up the built-in tools. Google's Inactive Account Manager and the legacy contact options at Apple and Facebook. It's free and takes 15 minutes.
- Think about Telegram. If it holds important work chats or channels, add other admins to your channels and save what matters elsewhere.
- List your accounts. Email, cloud storage, banks, exchanges, domains, subscriptions. No passwords — just what and where.
- Mind your phone number. Most recovery flows rely on SMS. If the number is cancelled, your family won't pass two-factor checks.
- Leave instructions for those who stay. What to open, whom to contact, what to delete and what to keep.
Where mementomori.digital fits
Built-in tools only work inside their own service. The list of accounts, instructions, device access and simply the words that matter have to be passed on separately — and exactly when you are gone.
That is what we built: you write a separate message for each recipient, it is encrypted in your browser, and it is delivered only after a long loss of contact and a manual check. As long as your monthly payment goes through, we do nothing.