One e-mail for 20 Eurocents
A long time ago, the German government presented a new idea: A reliable e-mail system, so that e-mails could be used for business communication. The name of this system is DE-mail and it is planned to include only a few certified e-mail providers.
One DE-Mail will Cost 20 Cents
However, Deutsche Post—one of the providers—now introduced they will charge your account with 20 Eurocents. Compared to a normal e-mail this is exactly 20 Eurocents more, because many e-mail providers offer accounts for free.
Compared to a standard letter with Deutsche Post for 55 Eurocents, this is much cheaper, but for only the transfer of some bits it is a lot. Of course this also depends on how many people will use the service and how many mails will be sent. Other providers meanwhile said they while make it cheaper. German ISP 1&1 mentioned 15 Eurocent, but they also added that “values of Eurocents were possible”.
Deutsche Post Failed with Lifetime e-mail
Some years ago, Deutsche Post wanted to start a service offering an e-mail account for your whole life, which also failed. The service was started in 2000 and stopped in 2005, because the “synergy effects they had hoped for did not become real”. Deutsche Post back then wanted to extend this system—for premium users—in a similar way as DE-mail by introducing “electronical certified mail”.
When the whole system did not work, Deutsche Post wanted to earn more money by offering advertisment free inboxes for paying customers. I am not sure, if POP3 was not common in 2003 or they added advertisment directly into the e-mail (like other e-mail providers do nowadays), but the idea didn’t seem to work.
Courts already Accepting normal e-mail
While the introduction of DE-mail is taking more and more time, courts are already starting to accept the normal e-mail system. This can of course be seen both positive or negative, but it is one big strike against DE-mail. If you have the choice between a free e-mail or a 20-Eurocent e-mail, both of them being legally accepted suficiently reliable, then the decision should be clear.
The Higher Regional Court Düsseldorf has accepted informational e-mails of an esteem agent as chargeable (the defendant has bought the house and therefore the treaty with the agent became legal).
A more discussable and maybe also ridiculous case is the judgement of the Regional Court Hamburg, which says that people have to anticipate written warnings via e-mail. This is of course a bit a problem, because many mails get just filtered by junk filters and the recipient does not know there should be such an e-mail.
For such cases (written warnings), a DE-mail could be useful, but who would open up an account just to wait for e-mails harming him?
Possible Surveillance
Due to several surveillance laws in the past months and years, there might be the possibility that the state wants to use this new method to gather easier access to sent and received e-mails. According to my knowledge end-to-end encryption should be supported, but only few people really use it. Therefore, the state would be able to reach business e-mails through only a few big providers.
The e-mails will be encrypted on the server, but this is only a encryption in the backend with the provider’s key. Therefore, the provider could also decrypt it easily and when the state forces the provider to do so, there is no way around it. If people use free providers then it is more complicated for the state, because he does not know all providers.
Saturday, February 13, 2010
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