In the heart of Denmark’s capital, next to the train tracks at Copenhagen Station, stands a red brick building with an ornate façade and a copper-clad cupola that turns green over time.
When it opened in 1912 as the General Post Office Building, its grandeur reflected the rise of the postal and telegraph services that crisscrossed Denmark and connected Danes to each other. Just over a century later, the building is now a luxury hotel and governs a city and country whose postal service has been abolished.
Postnord, Denmark’s national postal service, will deliver its last ever letter on Tuesday as the digital age brings the service to an end after 400 years. This makes Denmark the first country in the world to decide that physical mail is no longer essential or economically viable.
The precipitous decline of the national postal service is a familiar story, and one that is similar in other parts of the Western world as we become ever more reliant on digital means of communication.
The Danish postal service delivered more than 90% fewer letters in 2024 than in 2000. The U.S. Postal Service delivered 50% less mail in 2024 than in 2006.
And as our communication has moved primarily online, morphing into WhatsApp messages, video calls, or simply exchanging memes, our communication and language have changed accordingly.
Dirk van Miert, a professor at the Huygens Institute in the Netherlands who specializes in early modern knowledge networks, said the letters themselves “will also change status” and will often represent more intimate messages than their digital versions.
Knowledge networks that have been facilitated by letters for centuries are “only expanding” in online formats, facilitating both access to that knowledge and the rise of disinformation, he told CNN.
PostNord has been removing 1,500 mailboxes across Denmark since June. Hundreds of thousands of Danes tried to buy it when it went on sale on December 10 to raise money for charity. I paid either 2,000 Danish kroner ($315) or 1,500 Danish kroner ($236) for each mailbox, depending on how well it was used.
Instead of posting letters, Danes will have to drop them off at store kiosks, from which they will be delivered to domestic and international addresses by a private company, DAO. However, as online shopping remains popular, PostNord will continue to deliver packages.
Denmark is one of the most digitalized countries in the world. Even the public sector utilizes several online portals, with minimal physical communication from the government and much less reliance on postal services than in many other countries.
“Almost all Danes are fully digital, which means physical letters no longer serve the same purpose as they used to,” Andreas Bretvad, Post Nord Denmark’s public affairs and communications director, told CNN. “Today, most communications arrive in email boxes. The reality today is that the e-commerce and parcel market has far outstripped traditional mail.”
This may explain why it is the first country to make such a change, but it seems likely that other countries will eventually follow suit. Van Miert, who lives in the Netherlands, said he had to go to the store to post letters because there was no longer a postbox in town.
Still, the need for physical correspondence continues around the world, even if it has diminished. Some 2.6 billion people remain offline, and many more “lack meaningful connectivity” due to inadequate devices, poor coverage and limited digital skills, according to the United Nations-affiliated Universal Postal Union. It added that rural areas, women and people living in poverty are the worst affected.
And even in countries like Denmark, advocacy groups say some people who rely more on postal services, such as the elderly, could be negatively affected by the changes.
“For us, it’s very easy to access our email from our phones and websites… but we forgot to give those who are less digitally savvy the same possibility,” said Marlene Rishoej Cordes, a spokesperson for the DaneAge Association, a senior advocacy group.
She told CNN that her new postal carrier, DAO, offers a service that picks up mail at home addresses, but “it still has to be digital because you have to pay for this service and you can only pay digitally.”
This letter has undergone many changes over time, both in medium and style. “Formats changed from papyrus and wax tablets, then paper, then parchment in the Middle Ages, and now electronic devices,” Van Miert said.
In the 17th century, he added, students were taught “how to write proper letters, letters of consolation, letters of praise and congratulations,” following the tradition set by great philosophers and letter writers like Cicero and Erasmus. “Diplomatic letters required a completely different style from personal letters, so-called friendly letters.”
Nicole Ellison, a professor at the University of Michigan who specializes in computer-mediated communication, told CNN that writing has come to represent “an element of nostalgia” and a sense of permanence that technology can’t match.
Still, just like students who changed the way they wrote letters in response to different situations, digital communication has evolved to supplement some of the personal touch and emotional cues that handwritten letters can convey.
“We’ve figured out a way to inject these signals into a bleak medium,” Ellison said, referring to the emojis, GIFs and different colors peppered in texts and emails.
He said different media can convey different messages, but cautioned against assuming that “technology itself has agency.”
“We are human beings,” she said. “And ultimately, we will do our best to convey a rich emotional world using whatever means we have.”
Nevertheless, the disappearance of the letter has already sparked nostalgia in Denmark.
“Take a close look at the photo here,” said one Danish user of X, along with a photo of a mailbox. “In five years, you’ll be able to explain to a five-year-old what an old postbox was.”
