TRULINCS Email: character limits, attachments, monitoring, and printing mail labels

TRULINCS is the Bureau of Prisons electronic messaging program for federal inmates and their approved contacts. Using it is voluntary, but there's a big condition: by participating, both the inmate and the outside contact consent to monitoring and retention by Bureau staff. That consent covers incoming and outgoing electronic messages, transactional data, message contents, and other activities tied to the system.

TRULINCS messages are text only. No photos, no files, no add-ons. Each message also has a size limit of 13,000 characters, roughly two pages of text according to the Bureau. If you have a long update, split it into multiple messages so nothing gets cut off.

TRULINCS can also generate labels for outgoing postal mail. Inmates are ordinarily limited to printing no more than 10 TRULINCS-generated outgoing postal mail labels per day. If your loved one sends a lot of letters, that daily cap affects how many labeled envelopes they can prepare at once.

If you're thinking of TRULINCS as "private email," reset that expectation now. Participation means you and the inmate are consenting to Bureau staff monitoring and retaining everything that goes through the system. That includes message content, transactional data (activity details connected to the messages), and other TRULINCS activities. Assume anything you send or receive can be reviewed and kept.

• ✓ Write every message as if staff can read it later.
• ✓ Keep sensitive personal details out of TRULINCS messages if you do not want them monitored or retained.
• ✓ Remember that monitoring is part of participation for both the inmate and the community contact, not just one side.

Even if your loved one's TRULINCS access is limited or unavailable for any reason, the same privacy baseline applies: participation involves consent to monitoring and retention of electronic messages, transactional data, and other related activities by Bureau staff. And if you're really trying to figure out postal mail instead, keep the label rules in mind. TRULINCS-generated outgoing postal mail labels are ordinarily limited to 10 per day, unless the Warden or designee approves more.