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Telekom boss Tim Höttges (archive picture): Lots of dead mailboxes
Photo: Oliver Berg / dpa
Many companies and authorities are getting surprising mail from Deutsche Telekom these days. The Bonn-based company sends notice of termination - for a service that many customers have long since forgotten. It's about De-Mail, which Telekom wants to switch off in exactly one year. To be on the safe side, the Bonn-based company sends the letters of termination not only via the mail itself, but also by post. This illustrates the dilemma of the offer: Many mailboxes of the e-mail service, which was once advertised as particularly secure, have long been just dead mailboxes.
Ten years ago, the federal government introduced the service with great fuss by law: The new state-launched mail system was intended to "ensure secure, confidential and verifiable business transactions for everyone on the Internet". However, it never found enough users and customers, although it was free for private users at Telekom and was initially heavily advertised: "Your life will soon be easier," it said at the time. Administrative procedures and waiting times can soon be saved, and sensitive documents and contracts can be conveniently sent from home.
But the offer was in crisis from the start and was never to prevail.
Telekom alone made losses in the three-digit million range.
It was "strategically decided to only offer the De-Mail service until the end of August 2022 due to the lack of profitability," it says in the notice of termination to business customers.
Private customers are also to be informed of the imminent end of the offer in September.
In the federal government, the Federal Ministry of the Interior is responsible for the public-private partnership.
Although the specially enacted "De-Mail Act" obliged the authorities to set up access points for it, many took plenty of time to do so.
Because there were too few specific applications, the service was again not attractive for private users.
This chicken and egg problem has never been overcome.
In addition, there were critical voices early on.
Shortly after the launch, members of the Chaos Computer Club expressed massive doubts about security and data protection and described the solution as “Bullshit made in Germany”.
Another digital policy failure
The extent of the problems was also evident in the lack of transparency that had surrounded the publicly launched project for years. None of the partners published hard user numbers, the ministry and the companies involved tried their hand at crisis PR on a joint website and countered alleged "myths" about the service. Under the point “Nobody uses De-Mail” it is still stated that there are “more than a million” participants. The number of active users is likely to be significantly lower. At Telekom, the number of registered private users was apparently six-digit last, while that of business customers was in the five-digit range.
Telekom boss Tim Höttges had already spoken of a "dead horse" at the beginning of the year and publicly billed the "overcomplicated" service in an interview.
There was "never anyone who used this product," he grumbled at the time.
The decision to get out of De-Mail was only made this summer, according to company circles.
The background was apparently an expiring framework agreement with the Federal Ministry of the Interior.
For the federal government, the departure of Telekom is a blow - after all, the federal government has a stake in the Bonn-based group through KfW.
De-Mail joins the long series of digital policy failures during Angela Merkel's reign.
GMX is considering taking over Telekom customers
Apparently there had been negotiations over the past few months about financial support from the federal government for the high-deficit offer, but from the company's point of view these did not lead to a satisfactory result.
The Federal Ministry of the Interior left a current SPIEGEL inquiry unanswered.
However, Telekom is not the only De-Mail provider on the market, so its decision does not mean the official end of the project.
United Internet AG (1 & 1, GMX, web.de) and Mentana Claimsoft GmbH also currently offer De-Mail.
Apparently there were negotiations between Telekom and the competition in advance about a possible takeover of the Telekom customer base.
One is in discussion and examining options to make the previous Telekom customers offers for an "uninterrupted continuation of their De-Mail accounts", confirms the managing director of WEB.DE and GMX, Jan Oetjen. However, »further state support and the expansion of use« are important for this. As an example, Oetjen cites the countless letters from the authorities, which are still being delivered by post and which make up a large proportion of the annual volume of letters. He also sees “great potential” in the area of digital identification. In this way, the service could simplify the implementation of the Online Access Act. In it, the federal government had promised citizens to offer their most important administrative services online by the end of 2022. »This means that not every municipality and every country has to create new,set up your own login procedure for your online services, ”says Oetjen.
If the idea of taking over customers fails or those affected do not want to switch to other providers, users of the Telekom offers must become active next summer at the latest - and make backup copies of their De-Mails. After the forced termination of the contract, you would still have three months to transfer the messages stored in your mailboxes, according to the letter of termination. After that, all customer data will be irretrievably deleted.
