In 2005–2018, the state created email addresses using names and ending in @eesti.ee, or so-called aliases, for private persons when issuing ID cards or residence permits and for businesses when registering them. Addresses in the form of [email protected] (e.g. [email protected]) and [email protected] (e.g. [email protected]) can be used for private correspondence, but are not part of the national mailbox service – emails sent to these addresses are not stored in the national mailbox, but are forwarded directly to the regular email address of the user specified in the state portal (e.g. Gmail, Hotmail).
‘The solution of forwarding personal emails, which was created almost 20 years ago as an additional option, has become obsolete and it is not reasonable for the state to maintain a service at the expense of taxpayers that has few users and when there are very good alternatives offered by the private sector’ commented Joonas Heiter, Deputy Director General of the State Information System.
There are around 590,000 email addresses with first and last names, but only 2% of them are in active use. ‘At the beginning of the year, we conducted a survey among the owners of email addresses with their own names, according to which 60% of them did not know that they had an email address with their name and 70% did not consider it necessary to have such a forwarding address,’ Heiter said. There are 256,000 email addresses created with a business name, but there are even fewer active users than among private persons.
As anyone can send emails to [email protected] and [email protected], a lot of junk mail and other irrelevant material passes through them. ‘As a result, mainly due to the spam filters of Microsoft, Gmail and Yahoo, many necessary emails do not get delivered the forwarded addresses, which is why the service is neither consistent nor reliable today,’ explained Heiter. ‘We understand that the decision to close may cause temporary inconvenience to its small number of users and we apologise for this,’ he added.
People who have used email addresses using names and ending in @eesti.ee and shared them as their contact address should update their contact details with their service providers by 1 November at the latest. Those who have not used this email address as a contact address should do nothing. The RIA will send more detailed information and instructions to users via national mailboxes later this week.
The decision does not concern in any way [email protected] and [email protected] email addresses through which state agencies (e.g. the Transport Administration, the Police and Border Guard Board, the Ministry of the Interior, the Social Insurance Board, etc.) send official emails to citizens. ‘The national mailbox is designed to allow the state to send notifications to its citizens, and the RIA today is focusing on further developing email addresses [email protected] and [email protected] in order to ensure smooth communication and exchange of information between state agencies and their citizens,’ said Joonas Heiter.
You can check the existence of an email address with your name ending in @eesti.ee by logging in to the state portal www.eesti.ee, select ‘Mailbox’ from the desktop or left menu, then ‘Settings’ from the left menu and, if the address is in the form of [email protected] or [email protected], at the bottom of the page next to the language option, this confirms the existence of the alias.
More information about the closure of the service can be found on the eesti.ee website: www.eesti.ee/en/closing-alias/closing-alias
