scope:

This document specifies a secured electronic postal service, referred to as the Electronic Postal Certification Mark (EPCM) service, which provides a chain of evidence, stored by an administration as a trusted third party, to prove the existence of an electronic event, for a certain content, at a certain date and time, and involving one or more identified parties.

The service is defined by reference to the concepts, schemas and operations defined in CEN/TS 15121-1, Postal Services - Hybrid Mail - Part 1: Secured electronic postal services (SePS) interface specification - Concepts, schemas and operations. It requires support for five core SePS operations and permits optional support seven others.

This version of the specification does not cover:

- a description of the issues surrounding inter-operability between multiple postal SePS implementations when a business transaction Lifecycle requires the participation of more than one SePS implementation in a cross-border scenario involving two or more postal services;

- issues surrounding SePS usage in a 'multiple Certificate Authority' scenario where inter-operating posts are participating in a cross-border transaction as described above;

- examination of "Certificate Authority deployment model" alternatives necessitated by the cross-border scenarios described above.