EPO Mailbox notification from 1 April 2026

A short decision of the President of the EPO, dated 25 March 2026 and published as OJ EPO 2026, A20, changes the moment at which an office communication becomes legally effective for most users of the European system. It enters into force on 1 April 2026. The substantive shift is modest on paper and considerable in a docketing department: the date that starts a period running is the date a document appears in a Mailbox, and nobody will post you a duplicate.

What has the EPO actually decided?

The President of the EPO issued a decision dated 25 March 2026 concerning the web-based service MyEPO and electronic notification to the Mailbox in proceedings under the EPC and the PCT, published as OJ EPO 2026, A20 and entering into force on 1 April 2026.

Two features of that description matter. First, this is a President’s decision operating within Rule 127 EPC: it specifies how electronic notification under that provision is carried out rather than altering the underlying legal basis. Second, its field of application is proceedings under the EPC and the PCT. Matters that fall outside that description are governed by whichever instrument applies to them, and that should be established from the instrument itself rather than inferred by analogy from this decision.

When is a communication legally notified to a Mailbox?

Electronic notification under Rule 127 EPC is effected by electronic communication to an activated Mailbox, and documents reach their destination within the meaning of Rule 127(2) EPC on the date the document is made available in the corresponding Mailbox.

That is the operative sentence of the whole decision for anyone who manages deadlines. The trigger is availability, not retrieval. It is not the date someone logged in, not the date the document was opened, not the date it was forwarded to the responsible attorney, and not the date an alerting e-mail was read. If the document is available on a Friday afternoon and the file handler is away until the following Wednesday, the period has been running since Friday.

The corollary is that the starting date is set by an event on the EPO’s side of the connection, at a moment your organisation does not control and cannot postpone. Any internal process that treats download, distribution or acknowledgement as the start date will drift, and the drift always runs in the direction that costs you days.

What changes compared with the 2024 MyEPO Portfolio regime?

When the new decision enters into force, the decision of the President of 9 February 2024 concerning MyEPO Portfolio, published at OJ EPO 2024, A20, ceases to have effect.

The 2024 instrument is not amended or supplemented and does not continue to apply alongside the new one — it stops. Internal guidance, training material, standard operating procedures and instructions to outsourced service providers that cite OJ EPO 2024, A20 as their authority will be citing a lapsed decision from 1 April 2026 onwards. This is the least intellectually interesting item on the list and the one most likely to produce an audit finding, because a procedure that points at a superseded legal basis can survive for years without anything visibly breaking.

The other change with immediate operational bite is that, where electronic notification is used, no paper copies are notified in parallel. Organisations that have been running an informal belt-and-braces arrangement — electronic notification as the legal event, incoming post as the practical prompt — lose the prompt. If the paper copy was in truth what caused the deadline to appear in your system, that mechanism needs replacing before 1 April rather than after the first missed period.

Who can register, and who can inspect an unpublished file?

International agents and applicants without residence or principal place of business in an EPC contracting state may register for electronic notification via Mailbox under the ‘PCT Link’ service, while inspection of files relating to an unpublished European patent application is restricted to the appointed European professional representative or registered legal practitioner and to applicants with residence or principal place of business in an EPC contracting state who have not appointed a representative.

Read together, these provisions describe an access architecture that will not match the way many groups actually work. The file-inspection restriction for unpublished applications is drawn by reference to formal status: the appointed European professional representative or registered legal practitioner, or an unrepresented applicant established in a contracting state. An in-house IP manager at a US or Japanese parent, a co-applicant, a licensee, or an external paralegal working under a firm that is not the appointed representative — none of these is described by that formula. If your pre-publication workflow assumes that everyone with a legitimate business interest can open the file, test that assumption against the appointment records rather than against organisational logic.

The ‘PCT Link’ route addresses the mirror-image case: agents and applicants outside the contracting states who need electronic notification in PCT proceedings have a registration path, and it is a separate one. Treat it as a distinct onboarding step for each entity concerned, not as something that follows automatically because the firm already has EPO access.

Does anything in the shared area count as filing or notification?

No — documents uploaded to or edited in the MyEPO shared area are not considered as having been filed with the EPO or as having been notified by the EPO.

This deserves its own line in any internal instruction, because the shared area sits inside the same service and does not carry the same legal consequences. Work in progress there is not on file. A draft that both sides have viewed and amended has not been submitted. Equally, material appearing in the shared area is not a notification and starts no period running; only availability in the Mailbox does that. The risk runs in both directions, and the person most exposed to it is a junior handler who reasonably infers that anything visible inside MyEPO must be official.

Where does the decision stop, and where does your own process take over?

The decision settles scope, the mechanics of notification and the conditions of file inspection; it fixes the date on which a period begins without altering the length of any period that runs from that date, and further MyEPO functionalities are left to later announcement.

That division of labour is the point to plan around. Because notification is complete on the date of availability, the margin you actually enjoy is set by your monitoring interval rather than by anything in the instrument: an organisation that checks daily has lost a day when something goes wrong, and one that checks weekly has lost a week. The consequences of an unavailable Mailbox or an unretrieved document are therefore an operational exposure to be managed by design, and any remedy available in such circumstances lies elsewhere in the European system rather than in this decision. Relying on that possibility is a poor substitute for a monitoring routine that does not fail.

Nor should the present functional scope be treated as settled, since further functionalities are to be announced later. A configuration exercise completed once in March 2026 will need revisiting. And the field of application remains proceedings under the EPC and the PCT; for anything outside that, identify the governing instrument before assuming these rules apply.

What should you do before 1 April 2026?

Three tasks, in order of how badly they hurt if skipped.

First, confirm which Mailboxes are activated, for each representative and each applicant entity in your portfolio. Notification is effected to an activated Mailbox, so an entity whose Mailbox status you have not verified is an entity whose notification position you do not know. List entities registering through ‘PCT Link’ as separate items.

Second, assign named monitoring responsibility and a written escalation path keyed to Mailbox arrival dates. Since the period runs from the date the document is made available, decide who checks, how often, who covers absence, and what happens when the responsible attorney does not react.

Third, take parallel paper out of your process design and out of your written procedures. No paper copies are notified in parallel where electronic notification is used, so any step that waits for the post will wait indefinitely. While you are editing those documents, replace references to the decision of 9 February 2024, which ceases to have effect, with OJ EPO 2026, A20.