When your letter arrives at the facility it goes through the standard mailroom inspection and gets distributed to your inmate at mail call, the same as any other piece of physical mail. The envelope has InmateAid's return address on it, which is the address your inmate uses to write back.
To respond, your inmate simply writes a letter by hand, addresses it to the InmateAid return address printed on the envelope you sent, adds a stamp, and drops it in the outgoing mail. When that letter arrives at InmateAid it gets scanned and uploaded directly to your account dashboard. You receive an email notification letting you know a response is waiting, and you unlock it for $1.59 to read it.
On knowing whether your original letter was received, there is no automated delivery confirmation once mail enters a correctional facility. The most reliable way to know is to ask your inmate directly on their next call or to wait for a response letter to come back. If you sent something and several weeks pass with no acknowledgment at all, reach out to aid@inmateaid.com and the team will look into it and resend at no charge if needed.
This two-way letter system is particularly valuable at the thousands of facilities across the country that do not offer any form of inmate email service. For those facilities, physical mail through InmateAid combined with phone calls and visits is the complete picture of how outside contact works. Postcards and greeting cards are also available through the platform if you want to send something shorter or more visual between letters.