Germans should soon be able to enter into official correspondence online instead of having to resort to putting it into physical writing, after the country’s postal service announced it would be offering an ‘Internet Letter’ service.

The new medium is designed to be more official than a standard e-mail, yet be simple and secure.

Deutsche Post is also stipulating that such communications must include the sender’s name, but is promising that they will not be able to be edited by third parties.

The service will also be available to people who do not have access to Deutsche Post’s internet portal. In these instances, the postal service will print out the letter and deliver a ‘hard’ copy of it as normal.

PostandParcel reports that July 2010 is the expected introduction date of the new service, which for the first time, will allow the distribution of legal correspondence, contracts and invoices.

One major feature of the ‘Letter im Internet’ service is that senders will not be allowed to remain anonymous. Both senders and recipients should also be confident that, thanks to the use of the latest encryption technology, their correspondence cannot be seen by any third party.

The first customers for the ‘internet letter’ include German automobile association ADAC, LOTTO Hessen, DekaBank, two insurance companies BIG Direktkrankenversicherung and Zurich Versicherung as well as the Kommunale Rechenzentrum Minden-Ravensberg/Lippe (krz) which handles correspondence for numerous local councils in Germany’s most populous state, North Rhine Westphalia.

These organisations jointly have millions of customers, including ADAC with 17 million members alone. Talks are under way with other large companies and organisations, Deutsche Post reported.