The End of Mail in Denmark
February 19, 2026 at 10:47PMIf you’re of a certain age, you may recall the thrill of receiving actual snail mail, of opening the mailbox to find a letter addressed to you. In this piece for The Dial, Anna Juul mulls the end of mail delivery in Denmark. There are no more red postboxes, no more mail carriers, no more physical correspondence—except through an expensive private company nobody trusts. Juul grew up playing with a toy post office, fantasizing about stamping envelopes. Now she watches her aggressively digital country pat itself on the back while a quarter of its citizens can’t navigate the government’s digitized services. In its bid to put all processes online, Denmark has inadvertently created an underclass of people who do not or are unable to use the internet.
In Denmark, we’ve been talking a lot in recent years about the rise of a digital underclass in our otherwise flawless welfare state. It’s made up not just of older people and those living on the social margins, as one might expect, but also of people who work manual jobs, for example, and therefore haven’t previously needed to upload their entire lives into the digital space. Studies show that between 20 and 25 percent of Danes belong to the “digitally disadvantaged,” which means that they struggle to use the more than 100 digital platforms dedicated to public services now bogging down our society. Every Danish person has a “digital mailbox,” for instance, which we are required to check. If we don’t, we’re punished. Let me explain one way that this might happen: The Danish government withholds 12.5 percent of each individual’s salary. It’s known as “holiday money,” which to be honest I always thought was a little infantilizing, like we’re not capable of figuring out how to save up for our own holidays. Once a year, by a particular deadline, you have to apply to have it paid back into your account. One man missed a notification in his digital mailbox reminding him to apply to receive his own money (roughly 6,000 kroner, or $1,100), and as a result, the state simply decided to keep it.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/02/19/the-end-of-mail-in-denmark/
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