Deutsche Post is discontinuing its historic service: Delivery is only possible until the end of 2022
Created: 12/29/2022, 11:45 am
By: Jannis Gogolin
A historical artefact: Reichspost employees sent telegrams at tables like this one.
Deutsche Post will also be offering this service until December 31, 2022.
© teutopress/imago
Deutsche Post regularly surprises customers with new features.
Now she is taking an admittedly historical service out of the program.
Bonn – Precise delivery times, digital stamps or live tracking of the deliverer, Deutsche Post is constantly bringing new features onto the market.
In the meantime, the company even experimented with drones.
In addition to the technical innovations, however, a news service has survived that can be described without hesitation as historic.
Telegraphy: Deutsche Post discontinues historic service at the end of 2022
Actually, Deutsche Post, more precisely the Deutsche Post DHL Group, has only existed since 1995. Because on January 1 of this year, the Federal Republic of Germany privatized its former authority, the Deutsche Bundespost, and converted it into a conventional logistics and postal company.
However, a look at the history of the German postal system reveals that the predecessors of today's company reach far into the past.
A feature for fans of postal history: Telegram broadcasts
Even before the founding of the state-owned federal post office in 1950, there was the Reichspost.
Since 1872, the latter transported various correspondence through the then German Reich.
From today's size with 590,000 worldwide
The authorities at the time were still a long way from employees and fully electric delivery vehicles.
You had to use the stagecoach or rider to send letters - but that usually took time.
A telegram was sent for urgent and short messages.
Letter mail is still part of the standard repertoire.
But very few people knew that paperless telegrams, i.e. the transmission of purely electrical signals, were also available to Swiss Post customers.
The demand for this historic type of message transmission is correspondingly weak, also thanks to SMS or WhatsApp, Signal and Co. And so the company recently announced that it would completely discontinue the service at the end of the year, as the Post consumer
portal paketda.de reports
.
Until December 31: Deutsche Post offers historic but expensive service
The telegram impresses with fast and reliable delivery, according to Deutsche Post on its website.
If you post the message between midnight and 3 a.m., it will reach the recipient the next day.
But the service is relatively expensive.
Starting at 12.57 euros, the costs increase depending on the length up to 17.89 euros.
Four euros more for a neat envelope.
According to a post spokesman for
paketda.de
, all of this should only be possible until December 31st.
Then the company follows the international colleagues and discontinues the telegram service.
Until then, interested parties can still use the historic service.
However, it is not necessary to go to the post office.
Submitting the telegram is completely online.
Complaints about the end of the telegram are unlikely.
However, Deutsche Post is confronted with criticism in all other nooks and crannies, most recently because of a possible two-class society when it comes to mailing.
