Tumblr’s feature for sending questions to blog owners is called Ask.
Ask gives a Tumblr blog a dedicated way to receive questions from visitors and followers. Depending on the blog owner’s settings, people can send questions while logged in or submit them anonymously. The owner can then answer publicly, turning the question and response into a post, or leave it unanswered.
The feature became especially important for Tumblr’s “ask blogs,” where fictional characters, artists, communities, and individual users invited questions as part of their identity and content. Anonymous submissions helped lower the barrier to participation, although they could also create moderation problems because the sender was harder to identify.
Ask is often confused with Tumblr’s private messaging system. Messages are for direct conversations between users, while Ask is attached to a blog and is designed for questions. The wording “Ask” is therefore the canonical feature name, not “Inbox,” “Mail,” or the generic word “Questions.”