Businesses Are Getting a Mandatory Paid Electronic Mailbox for Government Correspondence

Russia is building a unified electronic mail system for legally significant correspondence between the state, businesses, and citizens – government bodies, local authorities, the central bank, and state-owned companies will send official messages not through ordinary mail but to a digital mailbox on the state services portal. For companies, individual entrepreneurs, and self-employed individuals, such a mailbox will become mandatory and paid, with the system rolled out in stages through 2026-2027.

How the system will work

The country’s largest postal company has been appointed operator of the system. In the personal account on the state services portal, a digital mailbox will be automatically created for every company, entrepreneur, and self-employed person, through which government bodies will send demands, notices, and other legally significant messages.

The key point is the rule on when a message is deemed received: it is considered received if the addressee does not log into their personal account within seven days of the document being posted, even if the letter was never actually opened. This works on the same logic as an ordinary registered letter, which is deemed delivered once the storage period at the post office expires, even if the recipient never picked it up. If a government body has no technical means of sending a message electronically, the document will be printed and delivered as an ordinary postal item.

How the mailbox will be tied to state registers and the state services portal

Access to the digital mailbox is only possible through a verified account in the unified identification and authentication system, the same one companies and entrepreneurs use to log into the state services portal. Once a mailbox is registered, its address is automatically included in the company’s or entrepreneur’s record in the Unified State Register of Legal Entities or Individual Entrepreneurs and becomes public information – counterparties will be able to see it in an ordinary register extract, the same way they now see a company’s legal address or the details of its director.

A separate change of particular relevance to legal practice is that the system’s operator is given the exclusive right to send registered letters carrying legally significant messages. Previously, the fact that such a notice had been sent could be confirmed through any postal operator or courier service; now, for the purposes of the Civil Code provision on legally significant communications, only a record in this system will count. That means existing contractual notice clauses – for example, provisions on exchanging letters by ordinary or electronic mail between the parties – may no longer be sufficient proof of proper notice and will need to be revisited the next time contract templates are updated.

Who is affected and on what timeline

The system is being rolled out in stages, with different deadlines applying to different categories of senders and recipients:

• starting January 1, companies and individual entrepreneurs will be able to register email accounts in the Russian Post system;
• a transition period for completing registration runs until 1 March 2027;
• the law takes full effect from 1 March 2027;
• from 1 September 2027, receiving letters directly from government bodies on a paid basis becomes operative – until that date, part of the correspondence may still go through existing channels.

How large-scale this reform is

According to available estimates, mandatory enrollment will affect around 6.8 million companies and individual entrepreneurs – in other words, this is not a narrow change for a single industry but a shift of essentially all official correspondence between the state and business in the country onto new rails. The initiative had been discussed since early 2026 as a concept from the relevant ministry, then moved from a proposal to a government-submitted bill and was passed by the State Duma in its final reading.

Importantly, the new system does not replace existing specialized channels – electronic document exchange with the tax service, filing with courts through existing electronic services, or exchanges with the pension and social insurance funds. It is being built as a universal additional layer for the rest of official correspondence that previously went out only as paper letters: various notices, demands, and notifications from agencies with which businesses had no dedicated digital communication channel.

What to watch out for in terms of risk

Concentrating all official correspondence in a single channel has a flip side to its convenience: if a company runs into access problems with the state services portal (a lost account, a technical outage, a change of responsible employee without a proper handover of access), the entire flow of incoming government correspondence is at risk at once, not just a single process. That makes backup access and keeping the list of authorized representatives in the identification system up to date a genuinely practical task, not a formality.

How much it will cost

The payment model for businesses and entrepreneurs is two-tiered: a monthly fee simply for having and maintaining the mailbox, and a separate charge for each legally significant message sent or received. The exact rates are to be set by the government in a separate decree that has not yet been published, but based on existing comparable electronic registered mail services, the estimated cost of a single message ranges from 60 to 90 rubles, while the subscription fee is estimated at around 70 rubles a month. Access to the mailbox will be suspended if payment is late.

Separately, the law caps the cost of delivering pensions and social benefits through federal postal organizations at no more than 1.5% of the payment amount, excluding VAT. This does not directly concern businesses, but it shows that the regulator is simultaneously trying to limit the burden on recipients of social payments.

What this changes for business

The main practical risk for companies and entrepreneurs is the seven-day rule. If the responsible employee does not check the digital mailbox regularly, an important demand, an audit notice, or even a court summons will be deemed received automatically, and all procedural deadlines will start running regardless of whether anyone actually saw the message. This makes monitoring the mailbox just as much a required routine task as checking ordinary email or a personal account in an electronic document management system.

It makes sense to already designate within the company someone responsible for regularly checking the digital mailbox on the state services portal, coordinate this with the legal and accounting departments, and budget for a new recurring expense line – the subscription fee and the cost of individual messages. Self-employed individuals should register a mailbox in advance rather than waiting for the deadline, since maintaining their tax status will depend directly on it.

It is also worth arranging a backup for the responsible employee’s vacations or sick leave – the seven-day rule applies regardless of who was supposed to check the mailbox, so a single person without backup access effectively becomes a single point of failure for the entire company’s official correspondence with the state. For groups with several legal entities, it makes sense to set up a single monitoring procedure for all mailboxes rather than relying on whoever happens to be available at the time.

Finally, it is worth checking in advance that the company’s records on authorized representatives are up to date in the identification system behind the state services portal, since that is what will determine who actually gets access to the mailbox and can respond to incoming demands in time.