An email to your landlord proves nothing; a burofax does

You write to your landlord that the boiler has been broken for three weeks. He reads it and says nothing. If this ends up in court, you will turn up with screenshots and he will turn up with a different version of what you wrote.

The burofax exists for exactly that gap. It is a delivery through Correos, Spain’s public postal company, in which the company itself certifies three things at once: what text you sent, to whom, and on what date. An ordinary email proves, at best, that you sent something; a burofax proves the content, and that difference is what a court accepts.

How to send one, in four steps:

1. Write the text on a sheet: date, your name and ID number, the recipient’s, the specific fact and what you are asking for, always with a deadline (“repair the boiler within seven calendar days”).

2. Go to a Correos branch, or log in to their website with a digital certificate, and ask for a burofax with certified copy and with proof of receipt. Without those two boxes ticked you are paying for an expensive fax that proves nothing.

3. Keep the receipt and, a few days later, download or collect the stamped copy. That copy is the evidence; the receipt is not.

4. Count the deadline from the date of the acknowledgement, not from the date you sent it.

It costs between 25 and 40 euros depending on pages and destination: less than an hour of a lawyer’s time. And before you hand it in, add one last line to the text: “I await a written reply within the stated deadline”.