The postal sector, the largest distribution network in the world, facing a decreasing letter volume due to both deregulation of the market and to substitution from electronic formats. One effect of the deregulation is that new operators are established and take market shares. The electronic media in form of e-mail and webpage’s, has taken a large part of the letter market. One way to meet this keener competition is to make distribution of mail more valuable and cost-effective for both the sender and the receiver by adding new options to the mail. In most countries there is only one operator who has the right to act as universal service provider in the meaning of UPU (Universal Post Union), called designated postal operator (DPO). Many of these DPO are developing a concept called Intelligent Mail to defense theirs market share.

The purpose of this paper is to give a broad picture of intelligent mail as a concept and also to what extent this new concept will be able to use in international letter distribution within the postal sector.

The data is mainly collected from different main operators through interviews and compared with written information.

There are mainly to findings. The first is that the content and meaning of Intelligent Mail differ a lot from operator to operator. The second finding is that systems needed to support options in the concept are not universal within the postal sector and therefore very hard to use in an international context.

The contribution of this paper is to give a deeper understanding of the Intelligent Mail concept and why this concept not is useful for international distribution within the postal industry today.