The future of the mail deliveries.

[octave]

Denmark becomes first country in world to end letter delivery       

 

 

 

 

 

[onetrack]

There goes all my Danish penfriends!!  😄 

[red750]

You just have to use email. Puts the postcard industry out of business.

[Jerry_Atrick]

 Obviously the article thows up a lot more questions than it answers. And of course. snail mail is subject to similar issues. 

 

The problems I see are that individual email servers can be configured differently, and, although I guess a lot more reliable than snail mail, issues of reliability have to be questioned. 

 

For example, the execution of legal court documents - how does one prove the receiver received it. I know summons are served by bailiffs, couriers, and the like, but lesser documents are usually done by mail. Where there is no physical recording of receipt (I can set up my own mail server which will contain my email address and switch off delivery receipts for example). 

 

Forgery of emails is stupidly simple. I can forge the email I receive or purported to send. Who did the forgery - the sender or the receiver? Unlike paper copies (which can too be forged, but a lot easier to pick up), there is no definitive record unles someone deploys a stsndard of file system protection (of which the standard's name I forget). 

 

How does this help scammers. While personal letter usage has undoubtedly dropped off the charts, all government and most financial services correspondence is done by snail mail. You will sometimes receive notification to expect the snail mail and to not treat it as junk mail. This means those scammers that phish via impersonating government  departments - for example the nations revenue service - will have a field day; anbd it will be the more vulnerable to fall prey to it. 

 

Of course, I am sure there are answers to the questions, but I don't trust bureaucrats nor corportate types to think of them until it starts happening. 

 

[octave]

In Denmark, although the government postage (letters) is being discontinued, a private company is still running a letter delivery service but as a private enterprise,  this should satisfy the need for paper-based communications.    

 

A couple of years ago, having the power of attorney over my mother, I had to sell her house interstate.  I thought I would be required to travel interstate; however, I was able to do it remotely. I signed the contract electronically. My understanding is that this is probably more secure than a signature on paper.

 

I think the headline is a little alarmist, but the article does explain that it is only the government postal (letter) service that is ending.  If there is a need or desire to send a piece of paper in an envelope, that can still be done via private companies. 

 

I think the issue is that the cost to post a letter is much greater than the cost of a stamp, and this is subsidised by the parcel service. 

 

These days, I probably only check the mail once a week, if that.

[Jerry_Atrick]

My point is, though, that the government letters - e.g. tax demands, welfare info updates, etc ig being done electronically, may open up a pandoras box of phishing based scamming and unless the government have dep-loyed lots of education and safeguards, there may be an adjustment period where someone had better have the resources to repay victims of fraud... 

 

It is only an anecdotal premonition, of course.

[octave]

I think the point is that these things (government letters, etc.) are already largely being done electronically, and therefore little demand for letter services. In Denmark, it is not a case of having to change these functions to digital because the mail is stopping, but they are stopping the mail because these things are already being done digitally.

 

Even in Australia (and I presume Britain), most of these functions are already done digitally. In the Danish situation, their post office is still delivering parcels, which is a growing and profitable area. I imagine they could also deliver documents.  I think the question is a what point does the traditional postie become unsustainable. 

 

 

[red750]

Maybe it would be better if Australia Post services were curtailed. They are pretty RS and have been for some time.

 

I sent a Christmas card and lotto ticket to my brother-in-law in Queensland. It was fully addressed with street name and number, town and postcode  We have sent cards to the same address for a number of years without problems. This year, it was returned with a big yellow sticker on it - "Post box unknown, Town name."

 

There are lots of complaints on Facebook, presents sent a week or two before Christmas still not delivered, parcels going within Victoria stuck in Perth. It's been the same for years.

[facthunter]

There's a HOLE in the Bucket, dear Lisa dear Lisa. Well, FIX it dear Henry, FIX it.  Don't throw the Baby out with the Bathwater. A  Letter Leaves no trace. Anything online is NOT  secure.  As they said in WW2, "Even the Walls have EARS". AND Loose Lips Sink Ships.   Just Because Tyres have Punctures WE are NOT likely to return to solid Rubber tyres. You STILL have to transport Objects.  MAKE it Happen. Nev

Edited 3 hours ago by facthunter

[octave]

Just to be clear, the Danish situation is not that you won't be able to send a standard letter. It is that the public postage system will no longer do it a private company will. There is also a law in Denmark that says the public post system must guarantee that either they or a private company must fulfil this service.  It comes down to whether we think one part of the postal system (parcel delivery) should subsidise a loss-making part of the business. 

 

I have been looking through some figures, and it seems the average price to process and deliver a letter is around $2.80. However, a stamp is only $1.70. The problem is that as fewer standard letters are sent, the delivery costs don't go down much; the postman has to travel down a given street whether they deliver 1 letter or 20.  In 2024, delivering standard letters cost almost half a billion dollars. The government does not subsidise this senders of parcels do. 

 

I am not necessarily against subsidies, but I do think we need to always be looking for more efficient and sustainable practices. The number of letters posted is dropping dramatically. Whereas once perhaps a posty would have a letter for perhaps 9 out of 10 houses, these days it might be 1 in 10. My point is, as this figure drops, do we pay half a billion a year to deliver to 1 in 100 houses, or do we find another way?

[onetrack]

Letter delivery services in most civilised countries were obliged to deliver letters at low cost when they started up. It was called the USO - Universal Service Obligation. This started with Britains Penny Post in 1840 and the system developed along similar lines in many other countries. When letter-writing ruled supreme and all documents were on paper, the system worked well.

 

But when the electronic messaging system started to take over from the start of this century, and letter deliveries started dropping in sizeable volumes, the costs of keeping up the USO became unsustainable. The USPS incurred horrendous debts with continuing losses over many years, and they had to up their charges and revamp their delivery system. The problem is the number of older people in particular who can't accept the demise of letters and who aren't computer literate. My 94 yr old neighbour checks his letterbox about 5 times a day, a habit he can't break.

 

He reckons computers are evil, the people with them have all the power, just like the Catholic Church did when he was a child! He said, if you didn't keep in with the priest when he was young, you didn't get a job!

So now he reckon computers have taken over from the Catholic Church, because all the information is now held secret from you, on computers! Maybe he's right! 😄 

[Marty_d]

1 hour ago, onetrack said:

Letter delivery services in most civilised countries were obliged to deliver letters at low cost when they started up. It was called the USO - Universal Service Obligation. This started with Britains Penny Post in 1840 and the system developed along similar lines in many other countries. When letter-writing ruled supreme and all documents were on paper, the system worked well.

 

But when the electronic messaging system started to take over from the start of this century, and letter deliveries started dropping in sizeable volumes, the costs of keeping up the USO became unsustainable. The USPS incurred horrendous debts with continuing losses over many years, and they had to up their charges and revamp their delivery system. The problem is the number of older people in particular who can't accept the demise of letters and who aren't computer literate. My 94 yr old neighbour checks his letterbox about 5 times a day, a habit he can't break.

 

He reckons computers are evil, the people with them have all the power, just like the Catholic Church did when he was a child! He said, if you didn't keep in with the priest when he was young, you didn't get a job!

So now he reckon computers have taken over from the Catholic Church, because all the information is now held secret from you, on computers! Maybe he's right! 😄 

[octave]

N

1 hour ago, onetrack said:

He reckons computers are evil,

We had to put my mother in care a couple of years ago. She lives in SA, and we live in Vic. We make a supreme effort to visit for a week four times a year.  Although I would not call her computer literate (she is about to turn 93), she is able (with a lot of help from us 😒)  to video call us and her friend of 70 years in the UK.  The other "inmates" at her home do not use tech and are of the opinion that they are too old, which I find very sad. As people age, it may get harder to "keep up", but it's the way to ensure happiness in old age.  

[octave]

Since Australia is a large country, postage has always been tailored to our spread-out population in terms of economics.

I just did a search for a picture of my old letter box from the property where I lived from 1990 to 2011.

 

 

My ex letter box is on the far left.  It is made from a barrel we found on our property when we bought it in 1990. It is made of plastic. This picture was apparently taken in 2019, and I am amazed that this plastic barrel has not had to be replaced. This mailbox was 4km from our property. We used to get our mail delivered 3 days a week by an old guy called Sid, who tendered for the contract and I suspect was really being ripped off. Living out there, we accepted that a daily mail delivery was not viable.  If we are going to continue letter deliveries, it is going to have to be perhaps on a weekly basis, or the prices are going to have to rise. Half a billion dollars is a lot of money for something that can generally be done a cheaper way.