E-Postbrief

» see epost.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

You wrote it on a screen and, quite often, it arrived as paper. That was the design, not a fallback nobody expected. If the person you were writing to also had an E-Postbrief account, your letter went to their inbox electronically. If they did not, Deutsche Post printed it, folded it into an envelope, franked it and handed it to a postman. One product, two completely different physical outcomes, and the sender did not have to know which one they were buying.

Deutsche Post launched it on 14 July 2010 behind an advertising campaign of the size that a former state monopoly can still afford. Two days later a quarter of a million people had signed up, and the activation queue jammed for most of the first ten days because the demand was larger than anybody had planned for. By November there were more than a million registered accounts. About a hundred thousand of them were being used for anything.

The gap between those two numbers is the product. Signing up was free and heavily advertised, so a million Germans did it. Sending was 85 cents plus 10 cents for each printed page, and a plain stamped letter cost 55 cents at the time, so almost nobody did that twice.

~ the record ~

~ the counter ~

The registration was the part people actually remember. To prove you were you, you did PostIdent, which means walking into a post office and showing a photo ID to a member of staff. Then a six-digit code arrived by SMS. Then, to confirm the address itself, a further one-time code was sent to your home in a physical letter, and you typed that into the portal. Your reward was something that looked exactly like an email address, [email protected], and which could not receive email. Nothing sent under the normal internet mail standard would reach it.

Turkey built its own answer to the same question at almost exactly the same time, the registered e-mail system KEP, hung off the national e-Devlet identity stack, and it went more or less where the German one did: real legal standing, and solid adoption among the companies obliged to use it. Ordinary people never picked it for their own correspondence. The idea that the state or the post office should certify who is allowed to send you a message was not a German eccentricity. It was the default assumption of that generation of e-government projects.

~ two deaths ~

Deutsche Post also lost in court over how it sold the thing. It had marketed the E-Postbrief as just as binding and as confidential as a letter, and the Landgericht Bonn told it to stop. Meanwhile the federal government was backing De-Mail, a competing scheme with the same purpose and the same adoption problem, so Germany spent the early 2010s running two rival legally-binding email systems against each other while everyone kept using ordinary email.

The obligation buried in the terms was its own warning. An E-Postbrief counted as received the same day or the next, with legal deadlines beginning to run from that point, and clause I.6.3 required customers to check the mailbox every working day. That is a product that can hurt you if you ignore it, sold to consumers as a convenience.

It ended twice. The electronic side was retired first: from 31 December 2019 no purely digital E-Postbrief could be sent, and the eIDAS Brief replaced it, initially for business customers only. The hybrid version, the one that came out of a printer at the far end, carried on for almost three more years before Deutsche Post discontinued the product on 30 November 2022. The half that was supposed to be the future died first, and the half involving paper and a postman outlived it.

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