Denmark has become the first nation in the world to discontinue public letter delivery due to digitisation.
Swedish-Danish postal company PostNord delivered its last letters on Tuesday, local time, ending 401 years of the service.
Denmark is one of the most digitised countries in the world and the number of letters had fallen by 90 per cent since 2000, the state-run company said in March as it announced the move.
PostNord said it intended to instead focus entirely on parcel deliveries as online shopping continues to increase.
On Tuesday, the service delivered its last ever letter to Copenhagen’s ENIGMA Museum of Communication, where it will become a permanent part of the exhibition.
The state-run postal service started to remove the nation’s 1500 red public mailboxes in the second half of 2025 and stopped selling stamps on December 18.
Since mid-December, interested parties have been able to purchase one of 1000 of the boxes – “a small piece of Danish cultural heritage”, as PostNord put it.
Depending on their condition, they cost the equivalent of $A340 to $A470. The proceeds will go to charity. Within a few days, all the letterboxes were sold.
From January, another 200 boxes will be auctioned off, including some designed by Danish artists.
Other examples of the letterboxes, which have been part of the Danish cityscape for more than 170 years, are likely to find a place in a museum.
Letter delivery in Denmark has been steadily reducing and was made more expensive in recent years.
Denmark is not the only nation where the letter business is in decline: Deutsche Post said it would cut 8000 jobs by the end of 2025 while the UK’s Royal Mail has been advocating for some time that letters should not be delivered on all weekdays.
Going forward, Danes will still be able to send letters through other logistics companies such as the smaller DAO.