World of Warcraft Forever: How to Send Gear and Money to Your Alts

Moving gear, bags, crafting materials, or coin from one of your characters to another in World of Warcraft Forever runs entirely through the in-game mail system. You do not need a friend, a trade window, or a paid service to shift items between your own alts on the same realm. You just need a mailbox, the exact name of the receiving character, and a few copper for postage.

Quick answer: Open any mailbox, click Send Mail, type your alt’s exact character name in the To: field, attach the items or enter the gold amount, then click Send. Log into the alt and collect it from any mailbox.

What you need before sending

Two things have to line up before you walk to a mailbox. First, the items or gold you want to move must be in the bags of the character doing the sending. Second, you need the exact spelling of the destination character’s name, since mail is delivered by name and a typo sends it to the wrong place or nowhere at all.

The gear, materials, or currency sitting in your sending character’s inventory.
The precise name of the alt receiving the mail on the same realm.
A small amount of copper to cover postage on attached items.
Access to any mailbox, found in cities, towns, and hubs.

Checking Location & Requirements — Checking the city map and bags before heading to a mailbox in Undercity. Shown at 00:15 in PazarGamingGuides’s video. Image: Blizzard Entertainment

Send gear and money through the mailbox

Sign in with the character whose gear or gold you intend to transfer. Confirm that all items being sent are stored in that character’s bags.

Walk up to a mailbox and right-click it to open the mail window. Any mailbox in a city or town works, so use the nearest one.

Click the Send Mail tab at the bottom of the mailbox window. This switches you from the inbox view to the outgoing message screen.

Enter your alternate character’s exact name in the To: field. Check the spelling carefully, since that name is the only routing information used.

Move items out of your bags and into the attachment slots along the window’s bottom edge. For currency transfers, fill in the money boxes with the amount to send. The first attached item automatically supplies the subject, for example, “Hunting Bow.”

Composing Mail — The Send Mail tab with the recipient name filled in and gear attached from the bags. Shown at 00:37 in PazarGamingGuides’s video. Image: Blizzard Entertainment

Click the Send button in the bottom-left corner. Attaching items adds a small postage fee, which was only 30 copper for a set of low-level gear. You will see a “Mail sent.” message confirm the parcel is on its way.

Press Esc to open the Game Menu and choose Log Out. You now need to switch over to the character that will pick up the mail.

On the character selection screen, click your alt and then Enter World. A mail icon next to that character’s name, showing the sender, tells you the delivery already went through.

Once your alt loads into the world, walk to the nearest mailbox and open it. The parcel appears in the inbox, and you can collect the items and any gold from there.

Spawning Recipient Character — The receiving character spawns in the Valley of Trials, ready to grab the mail from a local mailbox. Shown at 01:31 in PazarGamingGuides’s video. Image: Blizzard Entertainment

How to confirm the mail arrived

Mail between characters on one account arrives almost immediately. Two indicators confirm the transfer: beside the receiving alt on the character selection screen, an unread-mail icon appears with the sender’s name; after you enter that alt and access any mailbox, the package is already in the inbox and ready to open.

Attaching a Bind-on-Account item such as an heirloom alongside your gold acts as a safety net. If the name is wrong, a bound item cannot land on someone else’s character, so it protects the transfer from a mistyped recipient.

The same-name mail bug in the Forever beta

During the World of Warcraft Forever beta, players ran into an error when trying to mail between alts. The message reads “You can’t send mail to yourself.” even though the mail is going to a different character.

The cause is shared primary names. If several of your characters use the same first name, mail between them either gets blocked with that error or lands on the wrong character with the matching primary name. Players reported that sending to “Vig Thebutcher” from another of their own characters kept delivering to “Vig Vicious” instead, because both shared the “Vig” primary name.

The workaround players used was to give each alt a distinct primary name rather than reusing one across the roster. Deleting and recreating the affected alts with unique names restored normal mail delivery.

Mailing gold and cross-faction transfers

There is no cap on the gold you can mail between your own characters on the same realm, so you can move an entire balance in a single message if you want. The gold limits that exist only apply when you move a character to a different server through a paid transfer.

The one restriction to know is faction. You cannot mail directly between characters of opposing factions on the same server. To pass gold across factions, players route it through the Auction House by listing a cheap item at a high price so the intended buyer can claim it, which does incur the standard Auction House cut.

Mailing is for shifting items and currency between characters you already have. If instead you want to move an entire character to a new realm or a different World of Warcraft account, that is the paid Character Transfer service, which starts at $25.00 and carries its own restrictions, including that a character must have no mail sitting in the mailbox before it can be moved.