Danish Postal Service to Stop Delivering Letters After 400 Years

So if I’m in Denmark and I want to send my friend a piece of paper with something written on it, what happens now?

I assume I have to go into the post office and send it as a parcel (at higher cost), rather than slapping a stamp on it and dropping it into the post box, but the effect is otherwise mostly the same.

  n 1844, hearing from citizens from every party and under pressure to reform the postal system, Washington lawmakers and the Postmaster General had no intention of sitting still for any of "that Spooner's shenanigans." Suits against Spooner and his cohorts began. Railroad heads were given full warning that contracts for government mails would be removed and fines imposed unless space and passage were refused to private letter carriers. It was "round one" for the government when an agent of Spooner's company in Baltimore was found guilty and fined for transporting letters in a railroad car over a post road of the United States. Spooner himself was arrested in New York on March 7 on three charges by special agents of the Post Office. Another of his agents, Calvin Case, was held to bail for $100 around March 23 for carrying letters on the train. 

It's been decades since I wrote a letter and mailed it.

So, all they did was privatize their postal service. There will still have a postal service, but run by a private company.

I doubt this will end well, but Denmark is a small country so maybe it will work.

After a year it would be nice to see stats and compare delivery time, lost mail, cost between Dao and the old service,

Just to clarify. There is at least one chosen and contractually bound Mail Service provider in Denmark. Their terms are set in public tenders. The old state owned company - Post Nord - basically decide not to compete for the contract. A newer company - DAO - won the tender. What this means in legal terms:

Under law: DAO must comply with its postal permit obligations (nationwide service where offered, pricing transparency, quality monitoring). But there is no absolute legal universal delivery duty for all mail anymore.

Under government contract: DAO has a specific binding duty to deliver blind mail as defined in the tender it won - this is a contractual obligation, not a general statutory duty for all mail.

Be mindful that in principle the service provider could chose to not cover certain parts of the country. That has to be clearly stated in their terms of service. The Danish government are expected by the public to continue to subsidize delivery to people with special needs, in the contract identified as "blind mail"

Slightly related: In Finland all official mail from authorities will become electronic by default starting Jan 1st, 2026. There is the possibility to opt out. I am not convinced this is a wise direction. When Putin cuts a couple of sea cables again we are not able to access official communications. Yes, even elections are stored offshore.

What I don't see mentioned here or in the article:

PostNord Denmark has been operating with massive losses for a while now, in part because they were required by law to be able to deliver everywhere in Denmark, when there were very little demand for it. The money just isn't there, which is why the law has been changed.

The cost of sending a letter was also just going up and up. In 2025, it cost $4.55 _per letter_.

It’s striking that while many states push citizens toward digital-only public services, almost none provide a state-run email service. Instead, official communication is effectively outsourced to foreign, commercial platforms with uneven privacy records (e.g. Gmail). If governments are serious about digital sovereignty and data protection, they should operate their own email infrastructure and issue each citizen an official address, much like a social security number. Whether people actually use it or prefer a private alternative should remain a personal choice—but the state shouldn’t depend on third-party platforms as its default communication layer.

I know some people are mentioning a private provider who will be around. But they will charge a lot I’m sure, and this will continue to kill the practice of writing letters or sending greeting cards. It’s a bit sad knowing people will forget the value of a personal touch, and they’ll not know what they lost when all they do is send each other a text message or whatever.

It could be worse.

They could rely on providing banking services via shoddy software, and prosecute people, and hound them to death rather than face up as to how crap their software is, until someone makes a TV mini series about it to highlight the issue.

Fifty years ago, I was given a coin bank styled after the red Royal Mail letter box. That was in Solvang, CA. As these Danish immigrant-character communities (look also in Elkhorn, Racine, Greenville, etc) are little time capsules, you may have to travel to America to find a replica red slot to drop your letter.

The article wasn't clear how letters from outside Denmark will be handled, but maybe that's implicit in the Dao contract.

Previously when it was announced earlier this year:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43278934

Denmark has an official system for sending digital mail, which is how we receive letters from the government, bank statements, pay slips, and so on. Without this base load of paper mail, the economics of delivering paper mail stopped working.

We keep optimizing systems, but human life doesn’t necessarily optimize along with them.

When a society becomes fully efficient, people start craving the slow, the physical, the intentional.

Will companies be willing to pay more to send junk mail if it is no longer largely subsidized? In this regard it could be a good thing assuming they don’t already have a regulation against junk mail there.

Mail will arrive straight at the museum

There is nothing worse, than a rotten mail delivery system:

https://expatcircle.com/cms/underrated-quality-of-life-indic...

Many USPS outlets seem to be run down. But in my experience, mail delivery is pretty solid. And there is indeed a country without postal mail service. Panama!

When this came up earlier in the month (Denmark gets ready to cancel Christmas cards https://www.economist.com/europe/2025/11/27/denmark-gets-rea... ) it seemed more like PostNord was just stepping back opening the market up to other 'rivals' to continue service.