First 2 month experience with Epost.de

A while ago i wanted to check out the service of Deutsche Post to receive my incoming mail in a digital inbox. Which would be awesome because i’m not so often at home.

Why Deutsche Post? Because the german postal market is basically a monopole and most of the post is handled by this company.

So, first of all. Why after 2 month?

Funny thing, i totally forgot that i had it. Because i never got any notifications for an incoming mail. I was just remembered yesterday after i got a physical reminder that i have to pay for this service in my physical postbox 🤦‍♂.

After i received this, i checked my inbox the first time after 2 month and seen i had actually scanned 2 letters in it. Which is important for the next experience.

It is expensive.

The service costs around 24,99 Euro per month. So because the mentioned only 2 letters came in this month, it costs me around 12,5 per letter. “Awesome”.

The service itself is not very intuitive.

As i mentioned before i forgot a bit that i actually used it. The reason for this is how you initially approach this service.

The service itself looks like it is an unwanted side-product of the company. There is no intuitive usage, no directly recognizable help or way of support.

After you register yourself an account and verify your post address, you don’t really know if this is all. And now getting magically you physical mail also in your digital inbox.

Spoiler: it’s not.

You have crawl through the marking page of the service (not the actual inbox portal) to learn that you also have to have a payed subscription, before anything else happens.

The scan quality itself is … well, not so terrible that it is unreadable. But every modern smartphone make better scans.

And the last thing is: from the 2 scanned letters, i only got 1 of them as a physical copy. And yes, i opt-in to this option to get this additional because o didn’t trust this service from the beginning and wanted to make sure that i got my mail. Which i didn’t.

So, summarized:

• terrible usability of the actual service
• very expensive
• notification to not work (all the time)
• physical copies got lost
• scan quality is fine at best