The Iranian government has launched its own domestically developed ‘national email service’, which requires all citizens to sign up to the service and to interact safely with government officials.
During the registration process, account holders will have to furnish their local post office with their full name, national identification number and postcode.
Iran Minister for Information and Communication Technology Mohammad Hasan Nami was cited by Mehr as saying that all citizens would be assigned a national email address, but did not say if access to other email providers would be affected.
"For mutual interaction and communication between the government and the people, from now on every Iranian will receive a special email address along with their postcode," Nami said.
"With the assignment of an email address to every Iranian, government interactions with the people will take place electronically."
The country has been in discussions for several years for starting a domestic email service, as the government occasionally has barred access to other email providers such as Gmail and Yahoo.
Reports also reveal that the new website is capable of offering services to about 100 million users and the emailing service is compatible with Farsi, English, French as well as Arabic.
Each user account will be offered with a storage capacity of 50MB, which can further be raised to 2GB.