Deutsche Post discontinues E-Post

Deutsche Post has announced that it will be offering its E-Post service to private customers. In future, electronic mail will only be possible in cooperation with GMX and web.de. For corporate customers, on the other hand, nothing will change.

E-Post has failed

With the service introduced in 2010, Deutsche Post made it possible to submit letters digitally and still have them sent in analog form. After an elaborate registration process, which involved going through several verification steps, customers could submit their letters digitally to Deutsche Post, which would then print them out, add an envelope and stamp, and send them on their way. If both parties involved in the communication were registered with E-Post, purely digital transmission of the letter was also possible until 2020.

Although more than a million people registered for the service in the first four months alone, it ultimately failed. The service, which was touted at great expense as a step into digital letter communication, cost a lot and brought in little for Swiss Post – partly because it was hardly accepted by the masses. According to the dpa news agency, for example, many users never fully completed the registration process. The Post itself also admitted to this failure: “The E-POST portal and the E-POST app have achieved only limited market acceptance so far,” spokesman Alexander Edenhofer told golem.de.

Cooperation with GMX and web.de

However, this does not mark the end of the era of digital letter communication. Swiss Post has announced a cooperation with GMX and web.de at the same time as the termination of the E-Post service. The two services, which belong to 1&1, will in future offer the option of having digital messages sent on paper. To this end, they will transmit all relevant data to Deutsche Post, which will take care of sending the letters. The Post and DHL apps will also be equipped with such a feature.

Overall, this is a discontinuation of the service, but not of the associated offering. Rather, most of this will be outsourced. The post office expects this to be more successful and could be right: The cooperation has already existed in its basic features for two years and already reaches two million users. Theoretically, it is open to all 35 million users of the two platforms. The cooperation to date also includes the digital letter announcement.