Mailboxes will be deleted in November: Telekom’s De-Mail move is difficult

Actually, one was warned in Berlin. When Telekom boss Tim Höttges publicly announced at the beginning of the year that his company did not want to offer any services under the De-Mail law from the summer, there had long been talks in the background between the provider, its competitors and the responsible Federal Ministry of the Interior.

It is therefore surprising that the federal government only concluded a new framework agreement with the provider FP Digital Business Solutions GmbH in August and that its services have only been offered to the authorities in the federal department store since August 18. Instructions from the new provider for the automated migration of Telekom De-Mail accounts state that Telekom will provide a tool for transferring entire mailboxes from calendar week 32, which began on August 8th.

transmission problems

However, private users do not have access to this tool. You are left with a tool for exporting De-Mails in mbox format, which is limited to a maximum of ten mails at a time. Contrary to what was expected based on the announcements, Telekom has not lifted this restriction to date. Instead, on September 1st, she introduced a new tool for backing up the entire mailbox. You can either select individual emails to be backed up or back up the entire mailbox.

However, this tool does not secure the folder structure and generates an impractical ZIP archive with a – cryptically named – EML file per email. Whether you can do anything with it depends on your own mail client. For Thunderbird, the “ImportExportTools NG” add-on can at least import the mails into a local folder of the mail client, which enables the new sorting and archiving.

Ministries overslept the De-Mail move

Large customers of the caliber of a federal government should receive significantly more support from the providers. Nevertheless, many ministries and the Federal Chancellery have not yet succeeded in ensuring that they can be reached at all times via De-Mail. Apart from the relatively late provision of the new provider’s services by the Ministry of the Interior (BMI), many ministries apparently simply did not take care of this in good time. They are still legally obliged to grant access via De-Mail at any time.

Neither Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (Greens) nor Digital Minister Volker Wissing (FDP) was apparently important enough to be digitally available as required by law. On the websites of the Federal Foreign Office, the Federal Ministry of Justice (BMJ) and some other authorities, the De-Mail addresses are also provided with a mailto link, so that clicking on it opens the user’s e-mail client, which is unsuitable for De-Mails . This is not proof of digital competence.

On the BMJ’s website, the De-Mail address was simply changed from [email protected] to [email protected] after the change of government and the renaming of the ministry, without actually having one from the provider to set up an address. This was changed due to c’t research. The old address is still valid, but cannot be reached because it is still hosted by Telekom and not by FP Digital.

Service hardly used

After all, Wissing’s Digital Ministry had also removed the De-Mail address from the website due to the decommissioning by Telekom. At the request of c’t, a ministry spokesman said that although there is a legal obligation to be available, only very few citizens actually use De-Mail to contact the authority.

The government seems to be unaffected by the fact that citizens correspond more with housing benefit authorities or private insurance companies and banks, energy suppliers and telecommunications companies than with the chancellery and federal ministries. So far, De-Mail has been the only possibility accessible to everyone to electronically replace the written form in administrative proceedings and to receive electronic proof of access from the recipient, which is legally binding in court.

According to the BMI, there are currently no plans to extend the De-Mail obligation beyond the area of ​​the federal administration. Before De-Mail, like Telekom boss Höttges, is described as a “dead horse”, he would first have to be ridden.

(yeah)