Why this exists

An official letter in a language you half-read is a special kind of fear. It sits on the table all evening. You photograph it for a friend who "knows German". You paste it into a translator and get words without meaning: what is a Vollstreckungsankündigung, and is fourteen days a lot?

The people who know — translators, tax advisers, lawyers — charge €50–150 to tell you what the letter is. Not to solve it: just to name it and point at the date. That price exists because the knowledge is scattered across official portals in officialese.

What's This Letter does the naming and the pointing. It reads your letter twice — once to extract what it says, once to verify every claim against the document — and answers three questions: what is this, who sent it, by when must I act. Key passages are quoted word-for-word and translated. Facts about the notice type come from the authority's own pages, checked and dated.

It stops exactly where advice begins. It will not tell you whether the claim is right, what you owe, or what to argue — that is work for a licensed professional in your country, and pretending otherwise would make a $5 tool dangerous. What it does instead is turn a frightening envelope into a plain sentence and a date, in your language, in a minute.

How the letter pages are made. Each page describes one kind of letter from one country. Its facts — who sends it, the deadline and how it is counted, what happens if nothing is done, the ways to respond — are researched from the law that governs it and from the issuing authority's own pages. Every page lists those sources and the date they were last checked. Deadlines are calculated from the rule in the law itself — its presumption of delivery, its weekend rule — not from a typical figure.

When something is wrong, it is corrected on every page in every language, and the page's date moves with it. Recent corrections: Russian bailiffs' deadlines are counted in working days, not calendar days (17 September 2026); deadlines on Spanish electronic notifications no longer have ten days wrongly added (17 September 2026); the Russian tax notice for individuals is due on the fixed date printed on it — the page no longer counts thirty days from the notice (14 September 2026). If you find a mistake, write to the address at the bottom of the page: name the letter and the country, but never send the letter itself.

What's This Letter is an independent project. It shows no advertising and sells no data: the free read says what the letter is and who sent it; a pass pays for the full reading — dates, amounts, quotes — and the reply drafts.