Electronic Communication with the Munich City Administration – How to get in Contact

The city administration provides email and online forms corresponding to the different services offered on the internet.

To make sure the messages and documents you send to the city administration via email can be processed, all emails and files have to fulfill the following criteria:

1. All emails must comply with an internet standard (SMTP; MIME) and be written in western European characters.

2. Attachments will be accepted in the following formats and versions:
   * all files in ISO/IEC 26300 Open Document Format for Office Applications (Open Document), version 1.0 or higher, i.e. in particular
   ** .ODT (e.g. OpenOffice.org Writer version 2 or higher)
   ** .ODS (e.g. OpenOffice.org Calc version 2 or higher)
   *.RTF (Rich Text Format)
   *.PDF (Portable Document Format version 1.3 or higher)
   *.TXT (DOS ASCII Text, Windows ASCII Text)
   *.JPG, *.TIF, *.PGM, *.PBM, *.PNG (standard image formats)
   *.DOC (MS Word version 97/2000/XP or lower)
   *.XLS (MS Excel version 97/2000/XP or lower)
   
   Other formats or versions may only be used upon express approval of the receiving entity. None of the formats may contain any automated actions or programming (macros).

3. Compression programs may be used to reduce files in the above-mentioned formats in size (compressing). The City of Munich only accepts non-self-extracting ZIP archives (*.zip).

4. For technical reasons, emails should not exceed a size of 5 MB (including attachments).

5. Due to viruses increasingly spreading via email, the city administration takes appropriate countermeasures. Emails sent in HTML format and including scripts will be declined because they can be used to run different actions unnoticed.

6. In order to ensure electronic documents can be processed, emails with a “winmail.dat“ attachment will be declined.
   For further information, please refer to http://www.lhm-service.de/mail/v5.html

7. Some file extensions are blocked because these programs may run unnoticed: a list of all blocked file extensions is available at: http://www.lhm-service.de/mail/liste.html. If a special need arises (e.g. due to an ongoing virus attack), further files may be blocked.

8. If emails, scripts and/or any of the files mentioned above are sent to the City of Munich as attachments, the message will be declined and returned to sender with a corresponding error message.

9. In order to avoid spam mail, the city administration uses a software for identification of unsolicited mail. This procedure may lead to your emails being rejected because they are wrongly identified as spam based on certain criteria. However, for quick access to the City of Munich's mail server despite your emails being rejected, please fill out the following form for a temporary activation: http://www.lhm-service.de/mail/formular.html.

10. Please do not send any electronic mail to the city administration if the actual content can only be retrieved or downloaded from a website via a link in the email. These messages which are often referred to as “registered email“ will not be processed by the city administration for security reasons. Furthermore, “registered email“ is not considered a legally binding form of mail delivery; it is not comparable to postal delivery of a registered letter.

11. If you initiated electronic communication with the city administration, we assume that any further communication can also take place electronically, unless barred by any other regulations.

12. A formal delivery with proof of delivery is currently not possible via email.

13. Please note that data transmission over the internet is insecure and that therefore, the data transmitted might become known to unauthorized persons and might even be manipulated. Therefore, please do not use email for communicating confidential information to the city administration.
    So far, the city administration does not use any data encryption procedures or signature algorithms. For that reason, encrypted and/or signed emails can currently not be processed by the city administration.
    For documents which must be in writing in order to be effective (which normally means they must be signed), please use hard copy communication. In addition, we kindly ask you to take note of the City of Munich's privacy policy, available on the city's website muenchen.de at http://www.muenchen.de/home/81180/index.html.

We would also like to draw your attention to the regulations in section 3a of the Bavarian Act on Administrative Procedures (BayVwVfG):

''Electronic Communication

(1) Documents may be transmitted electronically if the recipient provides a relevant address.

(2) …

(3) If a document transmitted to an authority electronically cannot be processed, the authority will promptly notify the sender and inform him/her of the applicable technical framework conditions. If a recipient claims not to be able to process a document sent to him/her by the authority in electronic format, the authority shall be obliged to send it to him/her again in an appropriate electronic format or as a hard copy.''

Should you have any questions regarding electronic communication with the Munich city administration, please write an email to the following address: it.dir@muenchen.de