Letter preview: German Post switches off “digital copy”
German Post has offered free advance PDF delivery for some letters in the past three years. The service seems to be no longer profitable for the company.
The "digital copy" goes, the "letter announcement" shown in this picture on the left remains.
(Image: Deutsche Post)
Deutsche Post is discontinuing its "Digital Copy" service at the end of June. Since 2021, this has offered registered customers the free option of receiving a PDF document with the letter content by email in addition to a photo of the outer envelope for letters from large business customers such as insurance companies. Swiss Post is working together with GMW and Web.de.
It is discontinuing the service because fewer and fewer of its business customers were using it, a spokesperson for the Post explained to heise online. Private customers rarely received digital copies of their letters. Deutsche Post therefore decided to discontinue the service for cost reasons.
Postscan for a fee
Deutsche Post customers can still have their incoming letters, postcards and registered mail scanned; the Post calls the service "Postscan". It costs 15 euros per month. The "Briefankündigung" service, which has been available since the end of July 2020, will also remain available to the now almost 4 million users in the "Post & DHL" app and via GMX and Web.de and will be expanded.
In March 2021, when the "Digital Copy" service was launched, 50 major mail order companies such as Vodafone and Otto were on board, as well as 10,000 small and medium-sized companies, according to Swiss Post. They have to use a secure interface to upload the documents as PDFs. Swiss Post did not say how many business customers would ultimately remain.
(Image: Deutsche Post)
Post's business customers who use the "Digital Copy" service send a letter from a recipient registered for the service to them by post; the PDF is sent to Deutsche Post, which checks whether the specified recipient has activated the service. If not, the PDF is deleted. The digital copy is only delivered to the recipient once the corresponding physical letter has been processed in the mail centers. This is intended to ensure that the digital consignment content is the digital copy of a physical letter.
(anw)
