Denmark postal service to stop delivering letters | Hacker News Reader

Denmark postal service to stop delivering letters

bbc.com

74 pointssixhobbits69 comments

Denmark is a member of the Universal Postal Union, which requires each member to deliver letters received from abroad. It's unclear who will now have that responsibility. When the new postal act went into effect last year, it opened up the market for domestic letter deliveries, but PostNord was still responsible for foreign (both in- and outbound) deliveries.

Edit: Found a note on their website:

> You can send letters to and from abroad with PostNord for the rest of the year. PostNord Denmark has been appointed by the Ministry of Transport to handle international mail until 31 December 2025. After that, it will be up to the Ministry of Transport to decide, e.g. through a tender, who will handle the task in the future.

According to TV2 Denmark, DAO (who distributed news papers and parcels) has made a bid to take over: https://nyheder.tv2.dk/business/2025-03-06-slut-med-postnord...

In The Netherlands the traditional postal had switched to every-other-day delivery for non-critical mail, and 09:00 postbox pickup instead of 17:00.

It might feel a bit awkward for people who are used to everyday delivery, but with the low volume of mail something has to give. Either € per letter rises, or letter per € drops.

I'd rather they subsidized it and bring back fulltime employment. It went from a uniformed government job to a part-time bring-your-own-bike "gig" job.

But I believe that if you hire full-time staff that can work with a bit more flexibility - wider area for delivery, picking up mail as well, that kinda thing - instead of min/maxing it they can keep up if not improve the quality of work.

PostNord already did this in Denmark, to the extreme, which render their services pretty useless. Letters will frequently take up to 10 days to arrive.

A previously employer resorted to ask staff to take mail with them as they traveled between locations and drop of letters to clients when they either visited or drove past anyway.

Some government services didn't take the hint and mailed papers for signing, asking for them to be mailed back within 14 days, but if the letters doesn't arrive until 10 days later, how are you suppose to have it returned within 14?

Danes don't send much mail anyway, but the reduction of service just made everything worse. You can barely rely on PostNord for Christmas cards without posting them before December.

Their package delivery service is excellent though, but only in certain parts of the country.

I don’t know about Denmark but in Norway there is a discussion to pick up letters from designated supermarkets from where packages are already picked up.

The general decline in paper copies of official documents is scary.

The recent Conservative UK government put in place the "hostile environment" policy (official name!) and expelled and denied rights to people who had lived here for years, and had the right to. People were asked for documents going back years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windrush_scandal

If your government suddenly asked for your electronic payslips from a job 10 or 20 years ago, could you provide them? Does everyone print them out or store them in secure electronic storage?

> If your government suddenly asked for your electronic payslips from a job 10 or 20 years ago, could you provide them?

"electronic" isn't necessary for this question. Most people do not keep paper copies of their payslips going back 10 or 20 years either.

They're next to my receipt filing-cabinet.

Some form of Paperless-NGX setup is also an option :)

If payslips are paper, people at least have a fighting chance of retaining them. I have payslips from when I was a teenager. Not because I kept them, because I never threw them away.

Electronic documents, however, need deliberate attention to keep.

I purge paper after a year or two at most, and keep very limited important stuff digitally (I have my tax returns going back 5-10 years.)

I really don't think many people keep substantial amounts of paper records. The government policy cited upthread was clearly a scandal; most UK citizens would be unable to satisfy the same standard of proof, if that was in fact the test.

I have more electronic documents saved up from 15 years ago than paper ones. It works both ways though.

Lots of online things are not providing PDFs to download, and are making the web page layout miserable for "print to file" also -- collapsible sections that refuse to be all open, etc.

I know it’s gonna sound stupid, but personally, I’ve literally never had problems. In extreme scenarios, I’ve gone as far as taking screenshots and saving it to my Dropbox and calling it a day. Having your screenshot folder to point to cloud storage then also having autobackups to somewhere else is a better storage than having a gigantic pile of papers.

I don't disagree but I think the companies that still think in discrete report-style paper analogues are easier to archive, and that's slowly going away.

If my employer emailed me my payslip, I'd have a perfect record, as I have every email sent/recieved since the 1990s, with archives and backups too. I could passively collect them, like I passively received paper payslips and stored them, unopened, in a folder on a shelf.

But they don't. At best, they send me an email notifying me that if only I went to a website they run (when it's operational) and passed all sorts of second factor bullshit, and knew where to navigate to, I could download a copy. Apparently it's not secure if they just email it to me, but it was secure enough to send the same data through the hands of hundreds of postal workers.

People only have so much bandwidth, and requiring them to actively do a bunch of menial tasks that could be automated, but aren't, in the name of "security" is building up problems for the future.

You forgot the part where the platform rebranded and got a new domain name. And you have to log in with your company email address. And even if you switched it to your personal email before you left, and they kept the data, was the password rotated?

I'm also leaving out the part where they switched to a different ERP system that cost them millions, and to save some money, didn't import any data from the old system. They put out one email saying download all the old payslips because we're switching off the old system in a week, and if I miss that, my entire history of payslips is GONE FOREVER.

This is why they should send me a copy. It has about the same level of security as when they sent paper copies in the post.

I don't have copies of any payslips. And this isn't because they're digital. If they'd been mailed to me I would have recycled them all by now.

> your government suddenly asked for your electronic payslips from a job 10 or 20 years ago, could you provide them?

Many (I would hope all, but the world is a weird place) countries have laws stating for how long ago you need to be able to provide various kinds of data to the government.

I would think you wouldn’t need to do that for payslips of 10 or 20 years ago, as companies typically aren’t allowed to keep that data around for that long.

Yeah, most digital services keep these things for you, unless you actively delete it,which few people do. Whereas most people will throw out that stupid old paper.

The missing documents case is mentioned in this brilliant podcast, Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford | Laser Versus Parchment: Doomsday for the Disc: https://www.podbean.com/ea/dir-s4nk7-1bcc6872

He mentions a lot of other problems with missing digital docs.

Like high court rulings are referencing URLs that don't exist anymore.

> If your government suddenly asked for your electronic payslips from a job 10 or 20 years ago, could you provide them? Does everyone print them out or store them in secure electronic storage?

I don't know how far it goes back, but in Denmark it should be in the electronic inbox. e-boks / mit.dk

I've kept pay slips in a binder for years and while it was cute to review how much I earned 15 years ago, there was no other reason. I as a civilian do not have any archival requirements once a year's tax records have been finished. The party handling my pay slips - be it an employer or a 3rd party - presumably has a statutory requirement to archive these things for X years.

Back in 2014, we scheduled a vacation that took us to St. Petersburg. As I recall, the Russian visa application wanted the names and addresses of one's three most recent employers. My previous employer was a government contractor that was bought up by another such (General Dynamics?). My second-previous employer was simply out of business for all that I could tell.

I suppose that General Dynamics may still have by pay stubs from back when.

Frankly, I have better track of my electronic payslips than I ever did of hardcopies.

For some reason, my brain works much better with soft copies.

To operate a postal service, we need, as a strict minimum:

- A workforce with a pulse.

To operate a digital network, we need, as a strict minimum:

- A constant supply of electricity;

- Lot of complex tools built far away from lot of exotic material from all around the world;

- A workforce with lot of education and specialization.

We're making our civilization brittle and call that progress.

There’s even a movie: the Postman :) (everybody hated that movie)

There is even better one - Postal

Probably the only really good Uwe Boll movie.

That's the trade-off between efficiency and resilience. Another example are the egg prices in US. The industrialisation of agriculture made it more brittle.

And that simple approach can be ridiculously scalable. Look at how mailing/parcels/printing could scale up during covid. Mail can put a document in the hands of tens of millions quickly.

What happened during covid with the postal system?

More people ordering online?

Did you completely miss that part? Ordering stuff from the internet went through the roof and the effect on physical shops is being felt even now with bankruptcies often being traced back to the bad years of the lockdowns.

I'm very much in favour of the postal service, but I don't think you're being fair in this comparison.

To operate a postal service, you need a lot of sorting offices and service points (postboxes, post offices, letterboxes). Unless you have this infrastructure, I'm envisioning a postal service with a maximum capacity of whatever all its employees can hold in their hands at one time.

And you need an addressing system and/or lots of people familiar with the local area, otherwise delivery is too unreliable for use.

And you need an internal police force to stop your own workforce stealing people's goods -- the employees "with a pulse" but not "a lot of education" are especially bad for doing that.

Meanwhile, in remote African villages, you buy things at the shop by sending a text message like "pay 32.10 to 67319" on your Nokia 3210 from 1999. It texts the vendor confirmation, it texts you back a receipt. The phones are battery powered, you charge them with a solar panel or a hand crank. The radio masts (and backend servers) that power this service are sometimes lacking electricity, but you just learn to go shopping when there's signal.

Certainly, it wouldn't be easy to get back to having Nokia 3210s if some kind of global destruction happened. But the same is true of pen and paper -- we need industrial levels of production for paper, ink, pens (or quills), and good storage, for paper-based record keeping. Before that, we used cuneiform on clay tablets... I think we can assume that we'll keep our ability to manufacture basic ICs and remember how to do radio communication, we won't ever have to revert back to pre-Marconi days.

Having lived around the world and now residing in Denmark for a decade plus, I can confidently say PostNord is the worst postal service I've ever seen in my entire life.

If you Google r/copenhagen PostNord you will see countless horror stories, mostly focused around delivery drivers simply refusing to do their job by purposely not delivering packages. I doubt freeing them of their obligation to deliver letters is going to improve things.

We also have the full might of the state behind them who will happily charge you multiples of the value of your item coming in from out of country because they "inspected" it.

People in the US don't understand how good they've had it (well until very recently with tariffs), as you could get any item you wanted delivered to your doorstep with no additional fees and better customer service at a fraction of the price it costs us.

I have quite the opposite experience. PostNord called me once because I was not home, and I could tell them to just leave the package at the door. Now you can just do it via the app.

While I quite often from friend in America see that packages get re-routed multiple times to states around them.

I'm happy you had a positive experience, but your experience is not the norm.

Well, back to /r/fountainpenpals in order to send more letters, so that this doesn't happen in my country. I love letters and postcards, but I've become lazy recently.

While I'm not luddite, there is something special in sending and receiving a handwritten letters, even if the handwriting is as poor as mine. And it gives you an excuse to spend time with high quality writing implements and the opportunity to share something unique. The texture of proper paper is just so radically different from standard printer paper [0].

Btw. if anyone else is similarly inclined to get back into writing letters, I can recommend letterlocking [1]. Even though it's a bit of a gamble if the seal makes it through the post unharmed (I sometimes cheat and send the letter inside an extra envelope), the recipients are usually delighted, and that's what counts.

[0]: https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/forum/36-paper-and-... [1]: https://youtu.be/KMsuFaMoT28

Ungood. Whatever you think about the economics of letter delivery, or the advantages of all-digital - a good, old-fashioned postal service is an important part of a nation's social and trust networks.

Just put the letter in a box and send the box.

> postal service is an important part of a nation's social and trust networks

We're not using it for anything, so I'm not really sure how it contributes. Plus PostNord (the Danish postal service) doesn't have the best of reputations, though that is dependent on where in the country you're located.

Denmark is very advanced in digital service adoption. They are an almost cashless society.

The mail infrastructure should be cherished I agree but if there is no demand, there is no reason to operate other than a novelty

In the UK we regularly get small packages delivered by the postman which would otherwise need a trip by a delivery company.

are you sure that they are not just doing the last mile? Many packages are delivered to the local sorting office y alternative courier

Either way, delivery driver trips have been reduced

If I understood it correctly, PostNord will still deliver packages in Denmark.

I've lived in Denmark. You get a digital mailbox when you move there which is used by every utility and public service to contact you. There was very little paper mail to deal with. That was 10 years ago, so I'm not surprised that by now they'd be cutting letter delivery.

Why don’t they focus on delivering packages which are increasing in volume. They make us pick up packages from supermarkets and complain that there are not enough letters to deliver. I don’t know what obvious point I am missing.

If you do that here in Germany the whole country collapsed under a week.

Deutsche Post is about to let go of 8000.

https://www.thelocal.de/20250306/german-postal-service-to-cu...

To put that into perspective, PostNord only had 4,600 employees to begin with.

One underrated thing I appreciate about the USPS: postal fraud is serious business so I know that if it's important, it will always show up in my mailbox.

Easy to avoid email and SMS scams.

Wire fraud is no less serious punishment wise. The main factor is probably the operation cost, as sending scam mails is more expensive per recipient and scams usually have a fairly low yield.

    > Wire fraud is no less serious punishment wise

That might be true in principle, but definitely not true in practice. Cost might be the factor and the related facet is volume -- there's just no reasonable way to enforce it to the same degree as postal fraud and as you said, the price of the stamp itself is a deterrent. I get scam texts all the time; I've never gotten a scam letter.

I appreciate that all of my official tax and government documents continue to be delivered via physical mail.

In the last couple of years, I have had important letters get "lost" in USPS in the Dallas area including things I sent with the USPS guarantee, signature required etc. and things sent to me being lost. I didn't receive any official apology from USPS; I learned from the local news there was organized crime ring regularly opening up letters they thought contained checks. To make it short, USPS has forced me to stop send checks or anything important through the mail.

Do Danes send Christmas cards?

No, we use email instead, as postage is already too expensive. Paper mail is only used for formal stuff like wedding invitations.

It's not widespread, but I have heard about it.

What about old people who can't master computers?

They have to use another carrier.

I'm actually not sure if you still can get government communication in paper form, in Denmark.

Edit: Ah, yes you can get an exemption from digital post: https://www.borger.dk/hjaelp-og-vejledning/hvad-har-du-brug-...

Other countries like Switzerland are thinking at passing laws to protect people from this mandatory use of computers (e-government). Let me find the reference.

One allowed exemption is: "I have practical difficulties in acquiring MitID, which gives access to Digital Post" (via Firefox translate).

MitID is Denmark's digital ID system. It is only supported on proprietary US-based operating systems. https://www.mitid.dk/en-gb/help/help-universe/platform-suppo...

Do free software users count as having practical difficulties?

Do boycott-US users count as having practical difficulties?

I wonder if Denmark is reconsidering their national dependency on the US.

Huh? The Danish postal office is not named PostNord, that is a private for profit company.

Sidenote: Having lived in Denmark, dealing with Posten and receiving packages was not a positive experience. I was taxed 100 euro on my used shoes being sent me from another country for importing goods.

Posten is owned by PostNord, which is owned by the Danish and Swedish governments.

Wikipedia says that PostNord is the resulting company of merging Post Danmark and PostNord Sverige, the former being the national provider for mail in Denmark after it got privatized.

Please do this in Germany. Good luck.

You had one job.

Alright, folks, I lived in Denmark for quite a while, so let me be straight with you.

It’s probably the best country to live in Europe definitely a step above Germany and its Nordic neighbors.

Now, when it comes to street drugs, the quality isn’t great. I know some people who prefer ordering from the darknet and having it shipped straight to their mailbox. Since most transactions are done with Monero, the legal system can’t do much even if a package is intercepted. They can’t prove the payment. So, there’s a loophole in the system. If your package gets seized, it usually doesn’t lead to serious consequences.

That said, authorities recently introduced special X-ray scanners for mail. They see what’s happening, but it looks like a lot of darknet orders are still slipping through.

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