Got Guilt? Who doesn’t. It’s human to feel the itches and pangs of regrettable circumstances. To each his or her own as to what we feel guilty about and how deep the guilt goes. There are some still kicking themselves for not getting to everyone on their Christmas Card list. There are those that are not fazed about this because they assure themselves there is only so much one person can do and perhaps they even saved a small sapling by not conquering the Christmas Card list this year. However there are those slights that just don’t go away, that make one lie awake at night wishing for an opportunity to atone.  Well here the internet comes in handy once again. An article from The Wall Street Journal written by Elizabeth Bernstein tells of the new trend of the decades late apology.

Jane Angelich carried the guilt around for more than four decades. Years ago, she had been cruel to someone and had never acknowledged her actions. Often, she thought of the person she had hurt and wondered: Had he ever forgiven her?

Finally, she decided she could carry her burden no longer. So last winter she went online and looked up the person she had mistreated. Then she apologized for telling him to “drop dead” when he called her house back in 1961.

They were both 10 years old at the time.

“When something is nagging at you for 48 years, you need to clear it up,” says Ms. Angelich, 58 years old, a pet-products company chief executive in Novato, Calif. “That was the meanest thing I ever did to anyone.”

Jane Angelich, explained in her email to him that she hung up on him because she didn’t know how to talk to a boy at the time and was embarrassed that her mother was listening. He replied to her apology, she says, and said he did not remember the incident. “It was good to know, though, that luckily he wasn’t scarred for life,” she says.

Along with helping people reconnect with old flames, childhood friends and even long-lost relatives, the Internet is giving rise to a newer phenomenon: the decades-late apology. The Web allows us to converse by email, a form of communication that often makes us braver and more impulsive—and occasionally even more thoughtful—about what we say. There are even Web sites, such as ThePublicApology.com and PerfectApology.com, dedicated to facilitating our quest for absolution.

All this raises the question: Just because there is someone from our past we could apologize to, should we? After all, how effective is an act of contrition—whether proffered over the Web or otherwise—that comes many, many years late?

Consider my friend, who recently received a lengthy email from a guy she dated in college, apologizing for the way he treated her at a bar one night in 1987. He said he had always regretted his behavior. She says she had no idea what he was talking about.

Of course, some apologies—for things like theft or backstabbing a colleague—are serious and really should be made. But we live in a self-help culture, where therapists, 12-step program guides and talk-show hosts are forever reminding us that forgiveness and gratitude are the way to happiness (and sobriety). Many times, a long-overdue apology, much like a confession, does more for the person offering it up than it does for the one receiving it.

When an old high-school rival of Kathy Somes contacted her through Classmates.com last March, Ms. Somes, 46, apologized for her behavior years ago, which included putting gum in the girl’s hair, shooting her with a rubber-pellet gun and blowing a trumpet into her ear during band practice.

“I didn’t really care if she accepted my apology or not,” says Ms. Somes, an investment analyst in Kirtland, Ohio. “I felt better.” (And, she says, her classmate did accept her apology.)

So what do you do if you are overcome with the urge to apologize for something you did ages ago? Here are some tips:

• Make sure you are apologizing for the sake of the other person and not yourself. (A woman I interviewed who apologized to her sister—a year later—for mentioning her weight gain says her sister got upset all over again and accused her of “reminding her that she was fat.”) If your motives are selfish, don’t bother saying you are sorry.

• Resist sending an apology via a social-networking Web site. It’s too flip. Use the phone. Or at least write an email, which demonstrates a little more thoughtfulness.

• Ask how your actions affected the other person. “The best gift you can offer is the willingness to finally hear exactly what the other person felt like as a result of your actions,” says Karen Gail Lewis, a marriage and family therapist in Cincinnati.

• Be sincere. Explain why you did what you did, and why you are apologizing now.

• And—at the risk of sounding like your mother—try to apologize in a timelier manner next time. My 21-month-old nephew Zach did it last weekend, after throwing one of his toys at me. If he can do it, you can too.