Editor in chief at IamExpat Media
If you’ve been living in Germany a while, you’ll probably have noticed that this is a country obsessed with snail mail. But that could all be about to change with Deutsche Post’s new “Digital Copy” service.
It started last year with a service that informed customers via email if letters were on the way to them, but now Deutsche Post is taking its digitisation up a notch. The largest postal company in Germany has just signed an agreement with GMX and Web.de to start sending certain customer their letters via the internet.
From this week, the 35 million individuals in Germany who have either a GMX or Web.de email account can request to have a digital copy of their letters delivered to their email inboxes in advance of the physical copy (yes, the paper version will still be sent - old habits die hard - but it’s a step in the right direction!)
If that sounds a bit like Deutsche Post will start tearing open envelopes and reading your personal letters, don’t panic. In today’s modern world, plenty of companies don’t actually bother to print out their letters, stick them in envelopes, and stamp them.
Instead, they send the contents of the letter securely (for instance, in a PDF format) to an external service provider, such as Deutsche Post. From now on, therefore, these files can also be sent to the addressee via email, so long as all parties involved have given their consent.
This means that digital copies will only be available for correspondence from companies that have also signed up for the service. So far, 50 large international companies are on board, including Vodafone and the mail-order company Otto, as well as 10.000 small and medium-sized operations.
“For us, the digitisation of mail is not an end in itself, but serves to make our customers’ lives easier and more convenient,” said Tobias Meyer, Executive Board member at Deutsche Post.
If you are a GMX or Web.de user, you can opt into the service immediately, free of charge. A confirmation code will be sent (of course) by post to verify your address. Once you enter this code into the website to give consent, you can start receiving digital copies of your letters!