A macabre niche in the online economy is now being filled by Web sites that allow users to send e-mail messages from beyond the grave. For a modest fee, sites like youdeparted.com, letterfrombeyond.com, mylastemail.com and postexpression.com will send e-mail with instructions to be followed in the event of your death. {A beneficiary notifies site administrators of your passing}.
 
Sites for posthumous communications offer a way to tidy your affairs, making sure heirs know about wills, insurance papers, funeral instructions and the like. Users can also attend to more quotidian details often glossed over by estate planners, like the type of medication the cat should receive or how to turn off the pipes before the winter's freeze.
 
The Web sites, which claim to have from a few hundred to a few thousand clients, speak to a new social reality about people who die these days: they leave behind online friends as well as conventional ones. "Death ends a life, not a relationship," is the tag line of postexpression.com. Mark Wrafter, a founder of the site, says that clients sign up for fear that far-flung online friends might never hear of their demise. "The site was established resulting from my personal realization that I had more friends online than offline," he says in a {nonposthumous} e-mail message, "and that if I should die, then many of these people would never know. With Post Expression, I have set up my account that so if I do die, more than 150 people will be notified of this by e-mail."