Secure Messaging
The one communication channel between you and your co-parent that is built to be quoted in front of a judge. Every message is time-stamped at the moment of send, delivery, and read. Nothing can be edited or hard-deleted after the fact. Retractions leave a record. Attachments travel inline with the message they belong with. Search across years of history works in two seconds. Every word is part of an SHA-256 hash that lives forever in the public verifier.
Text messages are not designed to be evidence
iMessage, WhatsApp, and email were designed for casual communication — fast, ephemeral, deletable. Messages can be unsent. Attachments expire. The send timestamp is set by whoever\'s phone clock is currently right or wrong. Screenshots six months later carry the timestamp of when you took the screenshot, not when the message was sent.
Secure Messaging in CoParent.Help is the opposite of all of that — by design. The architectural choices below are not "features"; they are properties the messaging surface must have so that years of communication can later be exported into a Court-Ready Report that opposing counsel cannot successfully challenge on authenticity.
iMessage / WhatsApp
Messages can be unsent. Timestamps follow the device clock. Screenshots can be cropped, altered, or staged.
Reply-quote chains can be edited mid-thread. Attachments may expire. Authentication of headers requires expert testimony.
CoParent.Help Secure Messaging
Server-set timestamps. Append-only with retraction records. SHA-256 hash verification on every export. No screenshot interpretation required.
What the messaging surface actually does
Each item below is a property of the live product — not a roadmap promise, not a "coming soon", not a marketing abstraction.
Server-set send + delivery + read timestamps
Every message carries three timestamps the platform sets — none of them can be back-dated or edited by either party. Send time, delivery time when the message reached the recipient's session, and read time when the recipient first opened it. The three together produce a chain of fact a court can rely on.
Append-only — no edit, no hard-delete
After a message is sent, neither sender nor recipient can edit its contents. The sender may retract a message, but the retraction itself is a new record (visible to both parties) and the original content is preserved internally for the eventual Court-Ready Report. This is the structural foundation that lets the platform satisfy the business-records exception in FRE 803(6).
AI tone suggestions before send
When the platform detects escalation language, sarcasm, blame framing, or absolutes in your message draft, it offers a gentler rewording before you hit send. The suggestion is non-blocking — you can ignore it or take it — but the prompt itself often defuses a message you would have regretted sending five minutes later.
Inline attachments — photos, documents, voice notes
Attach a school report, a doctor's note, a receipt, a photo of an injury, or a voice memo directly to the message it belongs with. Attachments inherit the message's timestamp and hash inclusion — they are not separate files floating in another system that might get lost or contested.
Search across years of history
Full-text search across every message you and your co-parent have ever exchanged on the platform — by keyword, by child name, by date range, by sender. The thing your attorney needs three years later is two seconds away, not five hours of scrolling text screenshots.
Online status + typing indicators
See whether your co-parent is currently active in the platform — useful for time-sensitive coordination. Typing indicators show when a response is in progress. Neither status is fabricated; both are observed presence signals tied to the live session.
Conversation export as part of Court-Ready Reports
A full message thread (or any date range from it) is one of the seven evidence categories included in every Court-Ready PDF. The thread carries through with timestamps, retractions, attachments, and read confirmations — the exact record without any reformatting on your part.
Smart unread counters that reflect engagement
Unread counts surface across the dashboard and notifications so you never miss a message that requires response. Combined with read timestamps, the platform produces evidence not just of what was said but of when it was actually seen — useful when a co-parent later claims they never saw something.
Every message contributes to the verifiable hash
When you export a Court-Ready Report, every message in scope is serialized into a canonical JSON form and hashed with the rest of the record using SHA-256. The hash on the cover page changes if a single character of a single message is altered after generation — making any tampering immediately detectable on the public verifier.
When the architecture pays off
The 11pm message you never have to defend
You receive an aggressive message at 11:47 PM on a Tuesday. The send timestamp, the read timestamp, the exact text, and any later retraction by the sender are all in the platform — already organized, already hashed, already exportable. Six months later when your attorney needs the pattern, the work is already done.
The agreement neither party can rewrite later
You and your co-parent agree in messages that the other parent will cover orthodontic costs. Three months later they deny the agreement. The original messages — unaltered, time-stamped, and exportable — make that denial untenable.
The tone you would have regretted
You start typing a message in anger. The AI suggests a rewording. You take half of it, modify the rest, and send a message you can defend in front of a custody evaluator instead of one you would have apologized for the next day.
The attachment that travels with the message
You photograph a bruise. You attach the photo inside the message that describes how it happened. Six months later the timestamp, the photo, and the contemporaneous description are one connected record — not a photo from your phone's camera roll that the other side claims was taken later.
Communicate today. Have a defensible record tomorrow.
Your 10-day free trial includes full Secure Messaging — no credit card required — so you can start moving your co-parent communication into a neutral channel today. Choose Standard or Premium when you want unlimited history retention and Court-Ready exports.