Corrlinks.com Inmate Email: TRULINCS Federal Prison Email

By Elizabeth Franklin-Best, Esq., and Christopher Zoukis, JD, MBA

CorrLinks is the public-facing website a family member logs into to exchange messages with someone in federal prison; TRULINCS is the Bureau of Prisons computer system the incarcerated person uses at a terminal inside the housing unit. This is not a login page — CorrLinks is run by a private contractor, Advanced Technologies Group, and if you are looking for the sign-in screen it is at corrlinks.com, not here. What follows is the part the login screen will never tell you: what it costs, who reads it, how long you wait, and what gets an account shut off.

Everything below is grounded in the Bureau’s own policy as it stood on 7 September 2026 — principally Program Statement 4500.13, Trust Fund/Deposit Fund Manual, dated 5 May 2026 (printed 5/7/2026), whose Chapter 14 is now the governing national policy for TRULINCS. A Program Statement is Bureau policy, not law; the binding regulation for contact with people in the community is 28 C.F.R. part 540.

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CorrLinks and TRULINCS are two halves of one system

TRULINCS stands for Trust Fund Limited Inmate Computer System, and it is defined that way in the Bureau’s own glossary (PS 4500.13 at p. 11). It is a closed network of workstations inside federal institutions. People in custody do not have internet access — the policy says so in its first substantive sentence (PS 4500.13 at p. 118). Messages are not delivered to a Gmail or Yahoo inbox. They sit on a server, and both sides log in to a portal to read them.

The service inside TRULINCS that carries messages to and from the community is called Public Messaging. On the outside, that same traffic is presented through CorrLinks. So when your loved one says “email me,” they mean: create a CorrLinks account, accept their contact request, and log in to read what they wrote.

Three consequences follow immediately, and they explain most of the confusion families run into:

• Nothing arrives in your normal inbox. You can turn on an alert that tells you a message is waiting, but you still log in to CorrLinks to read it.
• No attachments, ever. PS 4500.13 at p. 130 states flatly that emails “may not contain attachments.” No photos, no PDFs, no forwarded newsletters.
• The person inside pays; you do not. The Bureau charges a per-minute fee “while in the Public Messaging Service” (PS 4500.13 at p. 130) and withdraws it directly from the trust fund account. There is no charge to the community contact for the messaging itself.

Workstations are ordinarily placed in the housing units and the law library. Housing-unit stations are multi-purpose; the law library stations are restricted to the Electronic Law Library and a few supporting services, because of the sensitivity of what is being researched there (PS 4500.13 at pp. 119–120). Each institution runs the system under its own Institution Supplement, which is required to address access hours, print locations, suspension procedures, fingerprint-correction procedures, and — where the facility offers it — video service procedures (PS 4500.13 at p. 14). That supplement is why the answer to “what are the hours” is different at FCI Terre Haute than at MCC Chicago.

How a family member gets connected, step by step

You cannot start this. Only the person inside can. That single fact answers more search queries than anything else on this page.

1. Your loved one adds you as a contact. At a TRULINCS terminal they open the Contact List service and enter your first name, last name, relationship, language, and postal address (PS 4500.13 at p. 125). To make you an email contact, they add your email address (PS 4500.13 at p. 126).
2. The system emails you an invitation. It tells you that a named federal prisoner wants to add you to their authorized email contact list, and that you may approve, refuse or ignore the request — or refuse this and all future requests from any federal prisoner (PS 4500.13 at p. 127).
3. You create a free CorrLinks account and enter the code. Approving is what activates you on their list (PS 4500.13 at p. 127).
4. By approving, you consent to monitoring. This is not fine print. The policy is explicit that a community member’s consent to staff monitoring of all TRULINCS emails and activity is obtained when they receive the system-generated notice and proceed with corresponding (PS 4500.13 at p. 119). Every message you receive also repeats that consent language and tells you how to remove yourself (PS 4500.13 at p. 127).
5. They log in with three things. Register number (eight digits), phone access code (nine digits), and either a registered fingerprint or a four-digit commissary PIN (PS 4500.13 at p. 122). Three consecutive failed attempts locks the account, and it takes a written request to the Trust Fund Supervisor to unlock it (PS 4500.13 at p. 122) — which is why a person who has just transferred can go silent for a week for an entirely boring reason.

If you do not know where your loved one is housed or what their register number is, start with the federal inmate locator and our explainer on how the register number works. You need the register number for almost everything else in this system.

How a family actually reaches someone inside: the four channels compared

Nobody publishes this in one place. Here it is, with a concrete value in every cell and the source behind each number.

	TRULINCS / CorrLinks email	Telephone (TRUFONE)	Postal mail (general)	Special / legal mail	Video
Who starts it	The person inside adds you; you accept (PS 4500.13 p. 126–127)	Only the person inside can dial out; you cannot call in (PS 5264.09 p. 3)	Either side, any time	Either side	Institution-dependent; no national program
What it costs	A per-minute fee, set by the Chief of the Trust Fund Branch, debited from the trust fund account (PS 4500.13 p. 119, 130)	Flat per-minute rate, uniform Bureau-wide, set by the Chief of the Trust Fund Branch (PS 4500.13 p. 55); FCC caps an IPCS provider at $0.09/min audio at a prison, plus up to $0.02 facility additive (47 C.F.R. § 64.6030(b)(1), (d))	Postage only; paper and envelopes are free (28 C.F.R. § 540.21(b))	Same postage; free stamps if indigent, up to 5 per week for legal mail (PS 5265.14 p. 19)	Where offered, an FCC-capped provider may charge up to $0.23/min at a prison (47 C.F.R. § 64.6030(c)(1))
Hard limits	30 active messaging contacts; 13,000 characters; no attachments (PS 4500.13 p. 126, 130)	30 numbers on the list (28 C.F.R. § 540.101(a)); up to 510 minutes/month, calls generally no longer than 15 minutes (PS 5264.09 pp. 6–7)	No page limit; open correspondence is the default (28 C.F.R. § 540.12(a))	Must be marked “Special Mail — Open only in the presence of the inmate” (28 C.F.R. § 540.18(a))	Set by the Institution Supplement, not by national policy (PS 4500.13 p. 14)
Who reads it	Staff. Stored and subject to content monitoring; no expectation of privacy (PS 4500.13 p. 118, 130)	Staff. All calls are recorded (PS 4500.13 p. 54); attorney calls, properly placed, are not monitored (28 C.F.R. § 540.102)	All incoming general mail is opened and inspected; may be read (28 C.F.R. § 540.14(a))	Opened in the person’s presence, inspected but not read (28 C.F.R. § 540.18(a))	Ordinarily monitored and recorded where offered
How long it takes	Held a minimum of one hour before release, longer when warranted (PS 4500.13 p. 130)	Real time, within the 6:00 a.m.–11:30 p.m. operating window (PS 5264.09 p. 7)	Delivery ordinarily within 24 hours of receipt at the mail room, weekdays (PS 5800.16 p. 20)	Priority handling; delivery attempts logged every 24 hours until delivered (PS 5800.16 p. 21)	Real time, when scheduled
How long the record lives	Messages viewable for 180 days, then purged from TRULINCS (PS 4500.13 p. 130)	Recordings retained; released to law enforcement on subpoena (PS 4500.13 p. 131)	Rejected content copied and held at least 3 months (PS 5265.14 p. 7)	Log entries retained by the mail room (PS 5800.16 p. 21)	Per the local supplement

One line in that table deserves to be pulled out and read twice. Email content can be handed to law enforcement without a subpoena; recorded phone calls require one. The Bureau says so directly: disclosure of TRULINCS transactional data and email content is a law-enforcement use under the system’s Privacy Act notice, and “[s]ubpoenas for these are not required, as compared to recorded telephone conversations” (PS 4500.13 at p. 131). If there is an open investigation, email is the least protected channel on this page.

For visits, see inmate visitation; for the phone system in depth, see inmate phone calls; for postal mail, see how to write an inmate.

What TRULINCS email costs, and who actually sets the price

The Bureau sets this price, not CorrLinks. PS 4500.13 at p. 119 is unambiguous: “The Chief, Trust Fund Branch, with the concurrence of the Assistant Director of the Administration Division, sets all program fees.” By using the service, the person inside consents to have those fees withdrawn straight from their Deposit Fund account.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. The Program Statement does not print a rate — not for messaging minutes, not for printing. The number can change administratively without a policy revision, and no rate table appears anywhere in the 134-page manual. So any page that states a per-minute figure as though it were policy is stating a price it cannot cite.

The long-published figure, and the one the system has charged for years, is five cents a minute — bought as TRU-Units at $0.05 each, in blocks of 40, 100, 200, 300 or 600, selected on the TRULINCS welcome screen. Printing a page of email has been billed at 15 cents, or three TRU-Units. Treat those as the working numbers and confirm the current rate on the terminal itself, because the terminal is the only place the current rate is authoritative.

Here is what that arithmetic looks like in practice, so you can budget rather than guess:

Money on the books	Minutes at $0.05/min	What that buys, realistically
$6	120 minutes	About four short sessions a week for a month
$15	300 minutes	Roughly ten minutes a day — a normal correspondence rhythm
$30	600 minutes	Twenty minutes a day, or long letters two or three times a week
$36	720 minutes	A full hour a day, twelve days a month

$15 to $30 a month is the range that keeps most people comfortably in contact without rationing minutes mid-sentence. Remember that the clock runs the whole time they are in Public Messaging — composing, reading, and browsing all count. Reading a long message costs money.

Applied Insight — Christopher Zoukis, JD, MBA, Managing Director: The single cheapest habit a family can adopt is to write long and write less often. Every minute spent scrolling an inbox is billed the same as a minute spent writing. When the person inside logs in to five short messages instead of one long one, they pay for five sessions of navigation to read the same words.

Money does not go to CorrLinks. It goes into the trust fund account, and deposits by family and friends must be mailed to the Bureau’s centralized processing center in Des Moines, Iowa — never to the institution — a rule the Bureau repeats on every facility page (see, for example, USP Terre Haute) and which is codified at 28 C.F.R. § 506.2. Our guides to sending money to a federal inmate, to Western Union and to MoneyGram walk through each route, and how much money to send puts the messaging budget in context with commissary.

There is one refund rule worth knowing. If public messaging or music privileges are restricted for more than 60 days, the person inside may ask in writing to have the TRU-Unit balance returned to the commissary account — a one-time transaction for the whole balance (PS 4500.13 at p. 121). Otherwise refunds are narrow: a documented system malfunction, a printer failure, or media the Central Office deems defective (PS 4500.13 at p. 121).

Premium CorrLinks options — what the contractor sells, and what it cannot change

CorrLinks sells two add-ons to the community side. These are contractor products. They are not Bureau services, they are not in any Program Statement, and buying one changes nothing on the inside.

• Premier Account — $6 per year. Real-time push notifications on a phone, the ability to send and receive in-app without logging into the website, and message retention of 60 days on the CorrLinks side instead of the standard 30 days.
• Inmate text messaging — $6 per month, or $36 per year. Delivers CorrLinks messages by text and lets you reply by text.

If you buy one, buy the Premier Account. It does the more useful thing — it tells you a message is waiting — and the text service duplicates it at six times the annual price.

Two cautions. First, prices set by a private contractor move without notice; confirm them on the CorrLinks site before paying. Second, do not confuse the contractor’s retention window with the Bureau’s. CorrLinks retention (30 or 60 days) governs how long a message sits in your account. The Bureau’s TRULINCS retention is 180 days — incoming, outgoing, draft, deleted and rejected messages are all accessible to the person inside for 180 days and are then automatically purged (PS 4500.13 at p. 130). If you need a record of a conversation, save it yourself. Neither window is a substitute for your own copy.

Time limits: how long a session runs, and how long you wait

The national parameters are in one sentence of policy, and most pages on the internet get them wrong.

“The maximum number of consecutive minutes an inmate may use the Public Messaging Service is 60 minutes; the interval between sessions is 15 minutes. The Warden may adjust time parameters to ensure the secure and orderly running of the institution.” — PS 4500.13 at p. 129

So the national default is a 60-minute maximum session with a 15-minute cool-down — and the Warden may change both. Shorter sessions (30 minutes is common) and longer waits are local adjustments made under that sentence, not national rules. If someone tells you “you get 30 minutes and then wait 30 minutes,” they are describing one institution’s supplement, not the Bureau’s policy. The place to confirm your facility’s setting is the local Institution Supplement, which is required to address TRULINCS access hours for both multi-purpose and dedicated stations (PS 4500.13 at p. 14).

Two related limits people ask about:

• There is no cap on the number of messages sent or received in a day. The constraint is time, not volume.
• On the community side there is normally no limit at all — you can write as often as you like. The important exception is a Communications Management Unit, where electronic messaging may be limited to two messages per calendar week to and from a single recipient at the Warden’s discretion (PS 5214.05 at p. 11).

By contrast, the telephone is capped at 510 minutes per calendar month; people eligible for First Step Act telephone incentives receive 300 minutes a month at no charge, and anyone who uses up 300 minutes may buy 210 more (PS 5264.09 at p. 7). Email has no monthly minute ceiling — only the per-session limit and whatever is on the books.

Size limits: 13,000 characters, no attachments, no formatting

A CorrLinks message may not exceed 13,000 characters (PS 4500.13 at p. 130). That is roughly 2,000 words — a genuinely long letter, four or five typed pages. A “Characters Remaining” counter runs on the composition screen.

The limit that trips people up is that it applies to the whole thread. If you reply and the quoted previous message comes along, that quoted text counts. Long back-and-forth threads hit the wall while each individual message still looks short. The fix is to start a fresh thread every few exchanges.

Everything else about the format is austere:

• Plain black text only. No bold, no italics, no accented or foreign characters.
• No photographs, no attachments, no files of any kind (PS 4500.13 at p. 130). If you want to send a picture, it goes through postal mail, as loose prints; a bound photo book is a different matter (see sending a photo book to prison).
• You cannot forward a message. The person inside can send the same message to several contacts at once by selecting multiple recipients before sending.

Who reads it, how long it is held, and what happens to a rejected message

Assume every word is read by someone other than the person you are writing to. The policy leaves no ambiguity: TRULINCS is Department of Justice property, the Department may monitor any activity and retrieve anything stored on it, and users “have no expectation of privacy as to any communication on or information stored within the system” (PS 4500.13 at p. 118). The person inside re-consents every single time they log in, by accepting the TRULINCS Electronic Messaging Warning/Responsibility/Acknowledgment Statement (PS 4500.13 at p. 119).

The mechanics of monitoring:

• Every message is held a minimum of one hour before it moves, and longer when warranted. Staff must approve or reject it during the hold or it releases automatically when the hold expires (PS 4500.13 at p. 130). That one-hour floor is the real reason messages feel slow — not the network.
• Messages are stored and subject to content monitoring by trained staff, and anyone flagged as requiring enhanced communications monitoring has their email reviewed as a matter of course (PS 4500.13 at p. 130).
• Rejection follows the same logic as the mail room. A message may be rejected if it depicts or encourages violence or group disruption, describes weapons or explosives, describes escape methods, facilitates criminal activity such as introducing contraband, directs a business without authorization, contains threats, extortion or obscenity, is written in code, is sexually explicit in a way that threatens institutional safety, or describes making alcohol or drugs (PS 4500.13 at pp. 130–131).
• The authority to reject a message is not delegated below the Associate Warden (PS 4500.13 at p. 130).
• The sender is told; the recipient is not. “When an email is rejected, the sender is notified their email will not be delivered and the reason(s) for the rejection. The intended recipient is not informed of the rejection” (PS 4500.13 at p. 131). If your messages stop arriving and nobody has said anything, that asymmetry is one explanation.

Email addresses can also be blocked outright, in three flavors — Bureau-wide (routed to the Central Office Intelligence and Investigative Unit, and capable of covering an entire domain), facility-wide (not delegable below the Associate Warden), and inmate-specific. Written block requests are ordinarily processed within one working day (PS 4500.13 at pp. 127–128). If you blocked yourself and want back on, the System Administrator restores you on a written request that includes your full name, your email address, the person’s name and register number, and the request itself (PS 4500.13 at p. 132).

One thing email is not: privileged. People may place attorneys, “special mail” recipients or other legal representatives on the public email contact list, but only “with the acknowledgment that public emails exchanged with such individuals will not be treated as privileged communications and will be subject to monitoring” (PS 4500.13 at pp. 126–127). Confidential contact with counsel runs through special mail, private attorney visits, and unmonitored legal calls — see attorney-client communications in the Bureau of Prisons and our summary of PS 1315.08, Inmate Legal Activities.

Forwarding a message is the fastest way to end the account

Do not forward what your loved one writes you to anyone else. This is the most common way a family member, acting from ordinary kindness, gets the account closed.

The rule is in PS 4500.13 at p. 131: if either the person inside or a community contact attempts to send messages that are rejected, forwards inmate emails to an unauthorized address, or otherwise violates the policy, the Warden may remove that individual from the program. Both parties are notified of the removal. The community member is removed too — not just the person in custody.

On the discipline side, the correct charge is narrower than most pages report, and getting it right matters if you are contesting an incident report. PS 5270.09, Inmate Discipline Program, at p. 18 says:

“Codes 199, 299, and 399, most like 196, 296, and 396, respectively, may be appropriate for inmates using electronic messaging (e.g., TRULINCS) in violation of policy.”

So electronic-messaging misuse is charged under the catch-all “conduct which disrupts… most like” codes — 199 (Greatest), 299 (High) or 399 (Moderate) — analogised to the mail codes 196, 296 and 396. Codes 297 and 397 are the telephone abuse codes (PS 5270.09 at pp. 49, 53), and an email charge written under 297 or 397 is charged under the wrong provision. The same paragraph names the natural sanction: Sanction Code F, loss of privileges, in the form of loss of electronic messaging privileges.

The severity level drives the exposure. A High-severity finding carries disallowance of ordinarily 25% to 50% (14–27 days) of the good conduct time available for the year; a Greatest-severity finding carries 50% to 75% (27–41 days); a Moderate-severity finding carries up to 25% (1–14 days) (PS 5270.09 at pp. 46–47, 50, 53). Losing email is not the whole cost. If an incident report has issued, read inmate discipline proceedings and the BP-A0288 incident report form before the hearing, not after.

Who gets cut off: exclusions, investigative holds, and disciplinary suspensions

Start from the policy’s own default, which is more generous than the reputation of the system suggests: “All inmates who are physically capable of accessing a TRULINCS terminal will be provided access in all but limited cases. Public messaging is the only exception to this approach” (PS 4500.13 at p. 122).

There are three separate routes to losing public messaging, and they run on different clocks.

1. Program or service exclusion (classification). The Warden may limit or deny the privilege, and that authority “may not be delegated below the Associate Warden level” (PS 4500.13 at p. 118). Two procedural protections attach. The person must be notified of the specific reasons in writing, unless possessing that writing would itself threaten their safety or another penological interest — and even then they retain a Freedom of Information Act right to the information from the central file, with reasonable opportunities to access and review it (PS 4500.13 at p. 122). And the exclusion must be individualized: “An inmate’s exclusion from participation must be based on their individual history of behavior… Inmates must not be excluded from participation based on general categorizations of previous conduct” (PS 4500.13 at p. 122). That sentence is the single most useful line in Chapter 14 for anyone contesting a blanket ban.

2. Pending investigation or discipline for TRULINCS misuse. The Warden may impose a partial or total restriction while an investigation or disciplinary process runs. Special Investigative Services recommends it; only the Warden may impose it; and it must be renewed in writing every 30 days on a new Request for TRULINCS (Electronic Messaging) Restriction form. Public-messaging restrictions of this kind are “limited to 30 days,” and Trust Fund staff keep a 30-day tracking file (PS 4500.13 at pp. 124–125, 132). A restriction that has quietly run past 30 days without a fresh written re-authorisation is not being administered the way the policy says it should be. That is worth a written request to staff.

3. Disciplinary sanction. The Disciplinary Hearing Officer or the Unit Discipline Committee may impose loss of public messaging or music privileges on someone found to have committed a prohibited act (PS 4500.13 at p. 124). In practice these come in 30-day increments and stack; a serious finding can produce months. All three routes are challengeable through the administrative remedy program, and the practical starting point is usually a written Inmate Request to Staff — which, on TRULINCS, is itself submitted electronically and is limited to one request per department per day (PS 4500.13 at p. 131). See also prison grievances.

Sex offense convictions, the Walsh assignment, and the automatic hold

This is where families see the most inconsistent outcomes, and the policy explains why.

TRULINCS automatically applies a temporary restriction to the account of anyone carrying a Walsh Act assignment of certified, with conviction, or no conviction in the Bureau’s inmate management system (PS 4500.13 at pp. 122–123). It is automatic, and it is temporary. Staff responsible for local sex offender management review those accounts to decide whether participation in Public Messaging “poses a realistic threat,” and the restriction “may be over-written when deemed appropriate by staff responsible for local sex offender management and approved by the Warden” (PS 4500.13 at p. 123).

The standard for continuing a restriction is written in terms of individual behavior: someone “whose offense, conduct, or other personal history indicates a propensity to offend through the use of email, or jeopardizes the safety, security, orderly operation of the correctional facility, or the protection of the public or staff, should be seriously considered for restriction” (PS 4500.13 at pp. 122–123). Read alongside the prohibition on excluding people “based on general categorizations of previous conduct,” the policy does not authorize a blanket ban on everyone with a sex offense conviction — it requires an individual assessment.

Separately, and permanently, a person may be barred from contact with specific individuals: prior child or adult victims of their sexual offenses; children being groomed and their caregivers; other sexual offenders; and any other public contact local sex offender management staff deem inappropriate given the person’s risk (PS 4500.13 at p. 123). Those are contact-specific bars, not a program exclusion.

Applied Insight — Christopher Zoukis, JD, MBA, Managing Director: When we look at a blanket email exclusion, the first thing we want to see is the written explanation the policy requires and whether it says anything about this person’s conduct. An exclusion memo that recites the offense of conviction and nothing else is not applying the standard the Program Statement sets out. The record either shows individualized reasoning or it does not, and that is what an administrative remedy is built around.

Related reading: surviving prison as a sex offender and sex offender treatment programs.

Segregation, protective custody, and Communications Management Units

Where someone is housed changes what they can do, and the rules are specific.

• Segregation. People confined in segregation “will not have access to the Public Messaging Service” — but they may continue to receive incoming emails, and staff are not responsible for printing those messages for them (PS 4500.13 at p. 124). So keep writing. It lands, and it will be waiting. Postal mail is the better channel here: the Warden must permit someone in segregation full correspondence privileges unless they are separately on restricted general correspondence (28 C.F.R. § 540.16(b)). See solitary confinement and Special Housing Units.
• Protective custody. People in a Protective Custody Unit do not have Public Messaging, and the Request to Staff service is not made available there either (PS 4500.13 at pp. 123–124). See protective custody.
• Secure units generally. In areas with special security concerns, the Warden decides which services are offered. Services with text-entry fields are ordinarily excluded, because they could be used to pass messages between people in custody. At a minimum, secure-unit workstations must offer the law library, TRU-Unit purchase, printing, and Request to Staff for reporting sexual abuse or harassment directly to the DOJ Office of Inspector General (PS 4500.13 at p. 123).
• Communications Management Units. Counter-intuitively, CMU residents do have access to Public Messaging (PS 4500.13 at p. 124) — but under phase-based caps that no other unit has. The current PS 5214.05, Communications Management Units, dated 26 February 2026, runs the CMU in three phases:

Phase	Approved community contacts	Electronic messaging	Telephone
Phase 1	10 per person	No limits within the allowed 10 contacts	3 connected 15-minute calls per month
Phase 2	20 per person	No limits within the allowed 20 contacts	1 connected 15-minute call per week
Phase 3	The ordinary TRULINCS contact limits	The ordinary TRULINCS contact limits	2 connected 15-minute calls per week

Source: PS 5214.05 at p. 8. Electronic messaging in a CMU “may be limited to two messages, per calendar week, to and from a single recipient at the discretion of the Warden,” and all incoming and outgoing messages must be reviewed by Counter Terrorism Unit staff before delivery, with foreign-language messages translated first (PS 5214.05 at p. 11). Postal mail in a CMU is capped at six pieces of paper, no larger than 8.5 × 11 inches, double-sided permitted, once per calendar week per recipient (PS 5214.05 at p. 9). Legal mail and legal calls are not limited (PS 5214.05 at p. 10). Our summary of the CMU policy covers the designation process.

A separate mechanism can block a specific person without touching the account: a Central Inmate Monitoring separation assignment, which identifies people who may not be confined together and can carry contact restrictions (PS 5180.05 at p. 5). See central inmate monitoring and separatees.

Practical things that make the system work better

• Type it somewhere else first. Compose in a word processor and paste into the CorrLinks window. The spell-check inside the system is poor, sessions time out, and a browser hiccup can cost a long message. Paste plain text; formatting will not survive.
• Turn on email alerts. In CorrLinks, Account Management → Manage My Inmate List → check the box under “email alert.” It does not put the message in your inbox — it tells you one is waiting.
• Keep the contact list clean and honest. People inside are limited to 100 active contacts overall, 30 active messaging contacts, 30 active phone numbers, and two postal addresses per contact (PS 4500.13 at pp. 125–126). And the list is a disciplinary trap: providing false or fictitious contact information — an incomplete name, altered details, anything intended to mislead monitoring staff about who a contact really is — is itself sanctionable (PS 4500.13 at p. 125). Use full legal names.
• Some contacts are off limits entirely. Victims, witnesses, other people connected to the criminal case, law enforcement officers, contractors, vendors who deliver to the institution, and volunteers (PS 4500.13 at p. 126).
• Person-to-person messaging between two people in custody needs approval. It is permitted only in line with the Correspondence policy, and Unit Management approval must be entered into TRULINCS and imaged into the trust fund system before it works (PS 4500.13 at p. 128; 28 C.F.R. § 540.17).
• Deleting a contact is not blocking. A person inside cannot block you, but they can delete your address, which ends the exchange until they add you back.
• Expect silence around a transfer. Accounts are released when someone is released or transferred in the trust fund system (PS 4500.13 at p. 121), and rebuilding a contact list at a new institution takes time. Use the inmate locator to confirm where they landed, and check whether the facility is affected by the 2026 prison closures.

What changed, and what governs CorrLinks email now

This is the section most pages on this topic have not updated, and it matters because the old policy is still quoted all over the internet.

TRULINCS electronic messaging no longer has its own Program Statement. It used to: PS 5265.13, Trust Fund Limited Inmate Computer System (TRULINCS) — Electronic Messaging, issued 19 February 2009 and cross-referenced as a live directive in the 2011 Correspondence policy (PS 5265.14 at p. 24). That standalone statement has been folded into Chapter 14 of the Trust Fund/Deposit Fund Manual. The current edition of that manual, PS 4500.13, carries a 5 May 2026 date and prints “5/7/2026” in its page footers, and its own summary of changes records revisions to the TRULINCS inmate-worker and compensation provisions (PS 4500.13 at p. 3).

Two practical consequences:

1. Quoting the rescinded PS 5265.13 gets the standard wrong. The current Chapter 14 is more protective in one specific respect: it forbids exclusion “based on general categorizations of previous conduct” (PS 4500.13 at p. 122). Anyone arguing against a categorical email ban should be citing the current manual, not the old statement.
2. Communications Management Unit policy was reissued on 26 February 2026. PS 5214.05 rescinded PS 5214.02 (1 April 2015) and introduced the three-phase structure and the Enhanced Classification Range described above (PS 5214.05 at p. 1). Pages describing CMU communication limits without those phases are describing the 2015 regime.

The correspondence, mail-management and publications policies behind the mail comparison have not moved: PS 5265.14 and PS 5800.16 both date from 5 April 2011, and PS 5266.11 from 9 November 2011. The telephone policy did move: PS 5264.09, dated 3 September 2026, rescinded the 2008 edition (PS 5264.08), changed the monthly minute limit and replaced the term TRULINCS with “electronic inmate communications system” in the telephone rules (p. 1). Our plain-English summaries live at inmate correspondence, mail management, incoming publications, inmate telephone regulations and the trust fund and commissary manual, in the full BOP policy library.

Where people get stuck with CorrLinks and TRULINCS email

“They added me weeks ago and I never got the invitation.” Check spam, then check the address they entered. If the address is wrong they must correct it at a terminal, and the invitation resends. If the address was ever blocked — by you, by the facility, or Bureau-wide — deleting the contact does not clear the block; the policy says explicitly that “[r]equests for blocking may not be processed by deleting the contact from an inmate account” (PS 4500.13 at p. 127). Removal takes a written request naming your full name, your email address, their name and register number (PS 4500.13 at p. 132).

“My messages stopped and nobody told me why.” Remember the asymmetry: when a message is rejected, only the sender is notified (PS 4500.13 at p. 131). If your outbound messages are going through but nothing comes back, the likelier explanations are a locked account after three failed logins, a transfer, a segregation placement, or a restriction. Confirm location first with the inmate locator, then send a letter — postal mail reaches places email does not.

“The suspension was supposed to be 30 days and it has been three months.” An investigative or pre-disciplinary public-messaging restriction is capped at 30 days and requires a fresh written re-authorisation by the Warden on a new form for each additional 30-day period (PS 4500.13 at pp. 124–125). Ask, in writing, for the current authorisation. A restriction that cannot produce one is not being run the way the policy requires.

“He was told everyone with his conviction is banned.” The policy forbids exclusion based on general categorisations of previous conduct, requires individualized reasoning, requires a written explanation, and puts the override decision with local sex offender management staff and the Warden (PS 4500.13 at pp. 122–123). Those are four separate things to check in the record.

“He is in the SHU and I don’t know if he’s getting anything.” Incoming email still reaches people in segregation even though they cannot send (PS 4500.13 at p. 124), but staff are not required to print it. Write a letter as well.

When a communication restriction needs more than a phone call

Most email problems are administrative and resolve with a written request to the Trust Fund Supervisor or the unit team. Some do not: a categorical exclusion that never engages the individual’s own history, an investigative restriction that has outlived its written authorisation, a disciplinary sanction resting on the wrong prohibited-act code, or a designation that reshapes every channel at once.

Elizabeth Franklin-Best, P.C. is a boutique federal criminal defense and appellate firm founded in 2019, with more than 20 years of federal and appellate criminal defense experience and a national federal practice run on an intentionally small caseload. We work on Bureau of Prisons administrative matters — designation, discipline, medical care, First Step Act time credits, and communication restrictions — alongside federal appeals, § 2255 motions, compassionate release and early release planning. If a restriction is affecting your family, contact us at (843) 620-1100 to talk it through. See also our federal prison consulting services and the problems we help with.

This firm is not affiliated with or endorsed by CorrLinks, Advanced Technologies Group, TRULINCS, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, or any correctional institution.

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Reviewed for legal accuracy by Elizabeth Franklin-Best, Esq., Principal Attorney·September 2026