Promoting a Contact to Guardian
A Guardian is a contact you appoint to help oversee one or more of your messages. Guardians can trigger Timeless deliveries, reschedule messages, update recipient lists, and more – depending on the permissions you grant them per message.
Before you can assign a Guardian to a message, you must promote them here first.
What a Guardian Can Do
Guardians are not passive – they have real capabilities tied to the messages you assign them to. Their exact powers depend on the permissions you set per message, but the overall role of a Guardian is to act as your trusted proxy for messages you’ve left behind.
For a full breakdown of every permission, see Guardian Permissions Reference →.
Requirements Before Promoting
A contact must meet one requirement to be promoted to Guardian:
- They must have an email address on their contact record
This is because the Guardian invitation is sent by email. If a contact has no email, the Promote to Guardian option will be greyed out.
How to Promote a Contact to Guardian
- Go to Dashboard → Contacts (web) or the Contacts tab (mobile)
- Open the contact’s detail view
- Tap Promote to Guardian
- Optionally mark them as Primary Guardian (see below)
- Tap Confirm
MessageFuture immediately sends a Guardian invitation email to the contact’s email address. Their Guardian status is set to pending until they accept.
[PLACEHOLDER: Screenshot of the Guardian invite email]
The Guardian Invitation Email
The invitation email tells your contact:
- That you have appointed them as a Guardian on MessageFuture
- What that role means (they will be asked to oversee messages you’ve created)
- A link to accept or decline the invitation
The contact does not need a MessageFuture account to receive the invitation – but they will need to create one (or sign in to an existing one) to accept it and access their Guardian dashboard.
Accepting the Invitation
When the contact clicks the link in the email, they are taken to the MessageFuture web app. If they do not have an account, they will be prompted to sign up first. Once signed in, they see an Accept Guardian Invitation confirmation screen.
[PLACEHOLDER: Screenshot of the “Accept Guardian Invitation” web page]
After accepting:
– Their Guardian status changes from pending → active
– They appear in your Contacts list with a Guardian badge
– Any messages you have already assigned them to will appear in their Guarded Messages dashboard
Primary Guardian vs. Regular Guardian
When promoting a contact, you can optionally mark them as your Primary Guardian. This is a label for your own organisational purposes – it does not grant any additional permissions automatically. You still configure permissions per message.
The Primary Guardian flag is useful if you have multiple Guardians and want to mark one as your main point of contact.
Guardian Status Reference
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
pending | Invitation sent; contact has not yet accepted |
active | Contact has accepted and is an active Guardian |
revoked | Guardian role has been removed (see below) |
Guardians with pending status cannot yet access any guarded messages. You can still assign them to messages while they are pending – they will gain access automatically once they accept.