Until 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. These addresses were intended for private correspondence and are not linked to the official [email protected] and [email protected] e-mail addresses to which public authorities send correspondence (e.g. official notices, fines, reminders).
There are around 590,000 email addresses using names and ending in @eesti.ee that are meant for forwarding private correspondence, but only less than 2% of them are in active use. ‘We informed users about the closure of email addresses in early May and remind them once again that from 1 November, emails sent to these addresses will no longer be forwarded. Anyone still using these email addresses as their contact address should update their contact details with their service providers by 1 November at the latest to ensure that the necessary emails continue to reach them,’ stressed Asso Kasuk, product manager of the national mailbox of RIA.
‘For example, for those who have forwarded emails to Gmail or Outlook, it is possible to find people who have sent emails to @eesti.ee by entering ‘sent to: [email protected]'in the search bar in the inbox,’ Kasuk noted. In addition, at the beginning of September, the RIA sent letters to various service providers (mobile operators, banks, energy companies, etc.) asking them to send a reminder to users of email addresses using names and ending in @eesti.ee to update their contact details.
There were several reasons for the decision to close the using names and and ending in @eesti.ee email address service this spring. Created almost 20 years ago as a convenience service, the personal mail forwarding solution has technically outlived its time and today 95% of emails going through these addresses are spam. ‘However, this means that spam filters such as those of Microsoft, Gmail, and Yahoo are intercepting these emails with the necessary emails, which is why the service is not complete or reliable today,’ Kasuk explained. ‘At the time, we also contacted the major providers of e-mail box services to find a solution to the problem and came to the conclusion that in order to provide a reliable service, a new solution would have to be built from scratch to replace the existing one,’ Kasuk added. At the beginning of the year, RIA also conducted a survey among the owners of email addresses with their own names, according to which ca 60% of them did not know that they had an email address with their name and ca 70% did not consider it necessary to have such a forwarding address.
‘Given the fact that the service has few users and the private sector offers good alternatives to it, it does not make sense to create a new service with taxpayers’ money,’ Kasuk explained. The RIA also considered the possibility of transferring the service to another public body in the field, but this did not materialise given the development and human resource costs involved.
According to the regulation of eesti.ee, the national mailbox on the state portal eesti.ee managed by the RIA was created to enable the state to send notifications to its citizens, and the RIA will focus on the further development of the e-mail addresses [email protected] and [email protected] in order to ensure smooth communication and information exchange between state authorities and citizens.
