The future of the mail deliveries.

[Jerry_Atrick]

I am not saying that we shouldn't tranistion to email. Most things sich as the sharing of engineering plans, and even tax returns, etc, are fine because even if they are intercepted, big deal. I have never met my accountant and when the books are submitted, they become public record anyway. Maybe ASIC charges a fee, whereas UK Companies House doesn't, but for a small chunk of change I can find out most of what I want to for any company or sole proprietor (and anything in between).

 

My argument is that email is still  not secure enough to force people to use it, even when the actions are performed though secure online services for some things - such as official government business and financial transactions. 

 

3 hours ago, octave said:

As usual, these discussions prompt me to do some research.  Whilst there are plenty of online scams, there are also scams involving physical mail theft.  One particular scheme involves stealing a bill from a letter box and reprinting it with different bank details.

 

Physical bills can be used in ID fraud. If you are receiving physical bills, you ought to shred them before disposal

Advice from Victorian Police Delivery and Mail Security says:

 

Minimise the amount of mail delivered to your home by:

• Not having bank or utility documents sent by post. Instead, have them sent by email.

 

You're quite right. I didn't say snail mail entirely protects. What you didn't mention is that email phishing fraud really, really dwarves stolen letter fraud - so the chances of it are happening are quite low. And while the "success" rate of snail mail fraud is higher, the overall lost to fraud this way is significantly lower as well. Also, I couodn't find any data, but I would imagine that the success rate of letter fraud is dropping two for two main reasons: Firstly, with direct debit/BPAY, secondly,. most people these days that pay a recurring bill probably have the payee details stored anyway, fourthly (not sure about Australia), when paying new payees, you have to enter the account name, whether it is business or personal and the bank BSB and account and if they do not match, you are warned to check the bill.

 

Also, if they decide to say up the bill significantly to increase their return, the utility company or whoever is likely to receive a phone call. And it is a lot of faff for the perpetrator. They have to steal the mail, scan the document, make the change, stuff the envelope making it look not tampered and deliver it again as the stamp has been stamped. 

 

In terms of the advice to send the bill to you electronically - it is good advice. Except for two things. Firstly, there is Business Email Compromise, which takes two forms. First, the hacker gets control of the email servers of the business and adulterates the email, as per this poor couple falling victim to: https://www.theage.com.au/lifestyle/life-and-relationships/hope-and-tom-paid-250-000-to-secure-their-dream-home-then-nearly-lost-it-all-20251104-p5n7pr.html 

 

The other is where a sniffer reads the email and attachment, makes the changes and immediately sends out a revised email, apologising for the mistake of payment details in the original email. 

 

If you want your physical bill untampered, yes, get it sent electronically. I agree. But, now you are expecting emails from that company, and there will inevitablly be a phishing email calling people to urgent action because of an imminent account closure or to validate or cancel an unusual transaction. And most people should ignore any links and log into their accounts, but sadly, even savvy people whose circumstances led to a lapse of concentration or the scammers merely put together some situation that coincidentally is very similar to the victims own at the moment, and in a lapse of concentration, they have clicked the link, divulged their credentials and their account has been drained in the blink of an eye.

 

So, you may be stiffed $100 or so for your monthly electricity bill - once - and if you don't use BPAY or you ignore the payee being dfifferent to the banks record. I know of one person who had over £10K drained from their account. They eventually got it back, but ultimately we collectively pay. 

 

And my point is, at the moment, to default to receive snail mail for financial transactions, but allow people to opt into pure email. They either recognise and mitigate the risks, or they ignore them, or they choose not to. Despite the risks of mail theft and fraud, the risks around email at this point in time are much higher. And therefore, I would suggest the advice given by Victoria Police Mail Delivery and Security, aboive, is narrowly framed and does not take into account all of the risks. 

4 hours ago, octave said:

I came for the discussion but stayed for the "untitting"

Well. I dunno.. I am normally happy to have their tops disrobed, but untitting sounds gruesome to me. 

 

[octave]

Just thinking about how I operate in terms of mail. As far as government communications, that is in my MGov account.  I may get an email that tells me there is a message (with no sensitive information) in MyGov, which I can then log into. This requires multi-factor authentication. At no point does any sensitive information sit in my physical mail box for 3 weeks while I am on my holiday. We wouldn't mind hitting the road for  6 months or more.

 

I do not often get an actual bill in my email.   For my electricity (which is by direct debit anyway), I get an email saying my bill is due on a certain day (again, no sensitive info in email). I would then generally go to the company's portal and check my usage to make sure it is correct.   For my rates I would get an email reminder of when they are due, again I go into the council portal and pay online.  This also applies to vehicle rego and licence. Recently, I had work done on my rooftop solar. Likewise, this is done within their portal. The only thing I can think of in recent times is repairs to my Aircon after which they phoned me and sent an account through Email.

 

I think we may be a little off track. There are many reasons people are not using the letter system. It is not all about email.  My mother used to write letters to our relatives overseas.  I can clearly remember retrieving the blue aerogram from England from the letter box..  These days, most of her relatives are dead and buried; however, she communicates with her best friend of over 70 years via video call. My son and partner are in China at the moment, and they will not send a postcard, but every day he will message us a whole bunch of great pictures. When my son is at home in NZ we will chat via Messenger or video call.

I cant actually remember the last time I needed to post a letter. If everyone resumed receiving bills and official letters by snail mail, I don't think it would have much of an effect on the economics of letter delivery.

 

So, back to bills how many bills are just sent as an email rather than just a prompt to sign into your account? In any case, I am going to pay online anyway. 

 

I believe in Denmark that for those who want to use snail mail, the service will still be available, but by a company contracted to fulfil the mandated obligation.    Having a postie ride/drive down every road to deliver very few letters is just too inefficient.  

 

I think the bottom line is that the number of physical letters being posted has dropped heavily and will continue to decline.   The price of delivering a letter can only really go up.  I am not against subsidisation (to a point), and I assume you believe this also.   Weighing off the risk of email fraud, billions of emails are sent every day, and most of them are not bills etc. If all bills and official documents communications return to snail mail, it won't really make a dent on the number of emails sent and received; each of these probably does carry some very small risk.

 

I do believe the way I run my personal admin is relatively safe, and I can't see any significant risk. Am I missing something?

 

My view is that as it becomes more and more financially untenable, we keep a private service going for older folk (this need will pass) or those who feel uncomfortable with digital methods. Do you believe this must be carried out by the official postal service?  Outside of the city, mail is usually delivered by a contractor anyway. I don't believe the old-fashioned postie, going down every road to deliver a very small number of articles, should be done at any cost (financially, environmentally, etc.). Parcels are not only delivered by Auspost there are many delivery companies competing to deliver to me, why not the same with letters?

[onetrack]

7 hours ago, rgmwa said:

Sounds like he did a good job. Did he reverse engineer the existing frames to check their capacity or just draw up the plans?

Not sure what he did, rgm - but I would expect he checked all those load-bearing capacities and sizes, and he seems to be a pretty switched-on bloke who understands the loads that sheds have to withstand.

[red750]

 

One pf the things affecting the writing of letters is that younger people these days are have forgotten or have not learnt to read and write cursive.  Everything is done on a keyboard. Even I now have to sit and practice a bit before I write anything, or it is totally unreadable.

 

Jerry, you seem to be the expert in this area. What is the chance of fraud with cloud storage? It seems everything you do ends up on the cloud. Even transferring a photo from my phone wants to send it to the cloud, and create a Word document or Excel spreadsheet, and click Save As, and the default destination is cloud storage. I have been receiving 3 or 4 emails a day for over a month saying my cloud storage is full, and requesting me to renew. The emails are obviously a scam, because they come from what look like private email addresses, the headline showing in my inbox summary mention names I don't know, or gobbledegook (eg tfg.h/uytfgbnyhjm, see below), and the email addresses are all No Reply addresses. They threaten deleting my files and photos, and now say I won't be able to send or receive emails. The only ones I want to stop receiving are these bloody cloud renewal ones. I just direct them to the trash folder. I have tried to cancel the cloud option from my computer and the cloud symbol in the taskbar has a slash through it.  

 

 

 

[facthunter]

I Hope you don't infect US. You can't just click on links. This site has come up unsafe in my new high security set up.  Replaced a Previous computer that took money from us. I had to junk it.. I can't afford THAT again. Nev

[red750]

I don't "just click on links", I delete them. I also have a strong antivirus that rejects and blocks an enormous amount of stuff. I run regular system scans to search for problems. All clear.

[red750]

I pay some of my bills by direct debit, council rates in monthly instalments, Linkt tollroad bill, health, car and house insurance. Phone bill, electricity, gas, water I pay incrementally each pension day by Bpay so I build up a credit. That's why the power bill I got today was $0.00. $23,60 in credit towards the next bill. I find it easier to budget that way. The phone bill is always the same. I have the cheapest plan Vodafone offer, and we never exceed the usage allowance on the plan. My phone and my daughters are on the one plan, she pays NBN and Foxtel.

[rgmwa]

3 hours ago, onetrack said:

Not sure what he did, rgm - but I would expect he checked all those load-bearing capacities and sizes, and he seems to be a pretty switched-on bloke who understands the loads that sheds have to withstand.

I hope he did. He signed off the drawings so he may be taking a risk if he didn’t. On the other hand most modified/re-purposed buildings don’t fail mainly because they never see their full design loads. You could say they rely more on a factor of ignorance than a factor of safety. I bought a hangar built from recycled materials that falls into that category.

[octave]

Here is a succinct summary (including pros and cons) of the Danish situation.  The surprise to me is that there are more 18 to 34-year-olds sending letters than oldies.

 

Denmark's state-run postal service, PostNord, has ended its national letter delivery after over 400 years, making it the first country in the world to fully phase out the service. The move, which became official at the end of December 2025, reflects the nation's high level of digitalization and a 90% decline in letter volumes since 2000. 

 

Key Drivers and Commentary

• Digital Dominance: Denmark is one of the world's most digitalized countries, with 97% of people aged 15 and over using digital identification platforms and most official communications, such as bills and bank statements, handled electronically. Many Danes rarely, if ever, send a physical letter.
• Economic Viability: The drop in volume from 1.5 billion letters in 2000 to just 110 million last year made the service no longer profitable. New legislation in 2024 opened the market to competition and added VAT to stamps, causing prices to skyrocket to over $4 per standard letter, which further accelerated the decline.
• Shift to Parcels: PostNord has pivoted to focus exclusively on the growing e-commerce parcel delivery market.
• Global Precedent: The situation is being watched by postal services worldwide, including Australia Post and the UK's Royal Mail, which are also grappling with declining letter volumes and exploring service changes. 

 

Social Impact and Alternatives

• Job Losses: The decision resulted in approximately 1,500 job cuts at PostNord.
• Vulnerable Populations: Advocacy groups like DaneAge have raised concerns that elderly people and those in remote areas who rely on physical mail for important communication, such as hospital appointments, may be disadvantaged by the shift.
• Private Sector Steps In: Danish law mandates that a letter service must remain available. A private company, DAO, has taken over letter delivery, expanding its services to fill the gap. Letters must now be dropped off at a DAO shop or a fee paid for home collection.
• Cultural Shift: The end of the 400-year-old tradition has been described as a "difficult decision" but inevitable. The iconic red mailboxes have been removed and many were eagerly snapped up by the public and museums when put up for auction, highlighting the sentimental value of the physical mail era.
• Niche Interest: Interestingly, some research from DAO suggests younger generations (18-34) send more letters than older groups, seeing physical mail as a more personal, "old school" alternative to digital communication. 
•  
• Sentimentality vs. Utility: While many Danes have pragmatically accepted the change, some observers note that the scarcity of physical mail has increased its perceived emotional value for personal messages like love letters or holiday cards. 
• Sentimentality vs. Utility: While many Danes have pragmatically accepted the change, some observers note that the scarcity of physical mail has increased its perceived emotional value for personal messages like love letters or holiday cards. 

   

   

[Jerry_Atrick]

12 hours ago, octave said:

I do believe the way I run my personal admin is relatively safe, and I can't see any significant risk. Am I missing something?

I agree with your post of which I quoted an extract. In your case, it is perfectly fine. In other cases, such as my mother who lives in a country town outside of Melbourne, it is very high risk - not the valid emails - but the phishing. I reiterate, these are becoming increasingly sophisticated and even tech savvy people fall for them from time to time. In my mother's case, I have imposed on her a rule to contact me or my brother before clicking any link she thinks is valid. There are millions like her in different demographics. What about those who live independently, but are metnally challenged, etc. There was an article in The Age or the Guardian a few yers ago where an IT journo unwittingly got scammed and he or she admitted she should have known better. 

 

I get all of the economics and the decline in mail. However, a govenment isn't about efficiency first - to suggest it is, is a furphy. And let's be frank, neither are large corporations. 

 

My point is it is not right to force a method of delivery - allow people to opt in - no probs. But the system is not safe. It has been implemented by the organisations safely in the way you describe, but that does not stop the scammers using to to scam people with far more success than is reported in the media. When the technology is safe enough, then great - force everyone to use it. 

 

My term about laziness wasn't people are lazy. But we rush into new convenient methods without thinking through the consequences. Australia is trailblazin as is the UK with what I think are sensibly targeted controls - a balance of protecting the rights of communications through the internet but curtailing the worst of it. It has taken how many years, in the face of those vociferous voices promoiting no internet censorship in th epursuit of free speech. In 2000, I argued in a forum that the internet had morphed into another mass media distribution channel and that, like TV, radio, newspapers, and the like, where moral-based censorship applied that still allowed free speech, the internet should be subject to such controls - with an opt in based on people who could verify their age (I suggested credit card or optical recogniton of official government docs wold suffice). This would allow the ISP to unblock traffic to their client and their client assumes responsibility at that stage. 

 

The team promoting non-censorship[ raised the government oppression argument, which I agree with, but also put the responsibility on the parents of parental control, which I totally disagree with. Even today, there is evidence that a massive majority of people do not understand the technology sufficiently to adopt practices to protect children from harmful content, and neither have the knowledge, resources, or time to continually monitor. The UK parliament decided to not require an opt into adult content, however, required the telcos to strengthen the parental controls they could adopt at the ISP level. This omitted one big issue - VPNs - which allow circumvention of these controls. 

 

A friend of mine, who works in a similar space to me, was heartbroken when he leaned his sone was addicted to porn - and some not great aspects of it from an early age of around 14, despite deplying ISP based and local parental contol software. Kids are clever with tech and his son used all sorts of circumvention However, if the ISP had have blocked all of this sort of content and blocked VPN TCP/IP packets, his child may have grown up without the affliction. 

 

 

11 hours ago, red750 said:

Jerry, you seem to be the expert in this area. What is the chance of fraud with cloud storage?

I am far from an expert on cybersecurity. We have dedicated teams and I would be paid a lot more than I am if I were an expert. But we received mandatory training and I try and keep myself well read in the area. I don't, as a habit, store documents on the cloud for a few reasons. Firstly, I think they are generally secure - but only as secure as anything else. Cybercrime is not the dark-hooded chap crackign passwords - it relies in the weakest links - software and human vulnerabilities. Therefore, Cloufd storage, IMHO, is as vulnerable as any other organisation - except they do our quite a bit of money into cybe protection. But recently, both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure werehacked causing outages.. so that speaks for itself. The other thing I don't like about it is that despite assurances, I don't trust these organisations to not snoopp on my stiff, use it to train artifical intelligence models (to their risk with my stuff), and, probably with the exception oif Apple, provide a back door to law enforcement. Not that I have anything to hide per se. I use all local storage except for some photos and I pay Drop Box a small subscription if I want to share files/data. I use NAS disk array for backups, firewalled so that only a certain set of machines machine on my network should be able to access it. 

 

 

 

 

[octave]

5 minutes ago, Jerry_Atrick said:

In other cases, such as my mother who lives in a country town outside of Melbourne, it is very high risk - not the valid emails

Yes I get that, and I am in a similar situation with my mother. The majority of scam emails come whether or not you get letters delivered to your letter box. This is just the nature of email.    Prior to me taking over my mother's affairs, she did everything by mail and yet, like the rest of us received plenty of dodgy emails. Sure, an email falsely tied to a business you may be dealing with can look more convincing. I believe it is not uncommon for stolen mail to be the entry point for many scammers.

 

From Scamwatch

"A stolen mail scam involves criminals intercepting physical mail (like bank statements, credit cards, or personal documents) to steal your identity and money, often using stolen info for fraudulent purchases or opening new accounts, and sometimes they follow up with phishing texts/emails impersonating legitimate services (like AusPost or myGov) to get more details; to protect yourself, use lockable mailboxes, report theft to police/Scamwatch, and be wary of suspicious links claiming to be from official sources. 

How Stolen Mail Scams Work

Physical Theft: Criminals steal mail, especially from unsecured mailboxes, to find credit cards, bank details, and personal info.

Fraudulent Use: They use stolen cards to buy expensive items (like designer goods) or open new accounts.

Phishing Follow-up: They send fake texts or emails (e.g., pretending to be Australia Post or Services Australia) with links to fake websites to steal login details after the initial mail theft. "

 

18 minutes ago, Jerry_Atrick said:

However, a govenment isn't about efficiency first - to suggest it is, is a furphy.

As a Government Business Enterprise AusPost is expected to be self-funded.

 

22 minutes ago, Jerry_Atrick said:

My point is it is not right to force a method of delivery - allow people to opt in - no probs.

I totally agree. This IS what is happening in Denmark.   There is a social obligation that Postnord has to ensure that there is a letter service. If no one else will provide it, then Postnord will have to resume doing it.  I definitely would not be in favour of Australia Post stopping letter deliveries if there were no viable alternatives.

 

If I get information posted to my physical mailbox from the tax department, and it gets stolen or I throw it out without shredding it, and it is used to help steal my identity or some other fraud I suspect I might be culpable to some degree. If I go to MyGov or my bank and my details are compromised, it is not my fault unless I have broken the rules

 

35 minutes ago, Jerry_Atrick said:

But we rush into new convenient methods without thinking through the consequences.

That is a tad judgey.  We are considering going on holiday to NZ and staying for 6 months, just bumming around in a campervan.   I suppose I could give a neighbour a key to my letter box and perhaps ring them each week to see if there are any bills for me, or I could go on managing my life whilst travelling.

 

My son owns a company with about 6 full-time employees, some live locally, but some work remotely. They are not going to post a letter about what tasks need to be finished that day.

A couple of years ago, my son spent 6 months in the US. He still needed to work and communicate with the rest of the company. At the moment he is in Beijing, touring but also getting some work done. The very nature of his work means that he has contractors overseas. A letter just is not going to cut it.

For many things, the snail part of snail mail is a problem; things move faster these days.

 

In both of the above examples, there are risks and rewards. Both we, and my son understand online safety, sure we could get fooled by an elaborate scam but again risk and rewards, not just being silly, naive or lazy people.    

 

Now of course, there are elderly folks who are not connected, or maybe just don't like the idea. That is absolutely fine.  There should always be a service for them. I can't see that this must be a government enterprise.   Both federal and state governments subsidise air routes.  In the old days, of course, we had government-owned TAA. 

 

Again, referring to my initial post, nobody is being forced online.   The number of Danish folk already online, of course, is higher than in most countries (I wonder if they have more fraud?)

In life we weigh up risks and rewards. It is no doubt safer to fly interstate, but sometimes a road trip is fun while recognising the risk (some people even ride motorbikes)