Digital communication
The city of Hof has opened electronic access in accordance with Article 3a of the Bavarian Administrative Procedure Act (BayVwVfG) for communication with the city administration. The city of Hof opens this access for citizens and companies in accordance with the general conditions listed below and Article 3a BayVwVfG. For electronic communication with the City of Hof, you can choose one of the following options, depending on the purpose and request:
Formless letters
For the transmission of electronic documents in informal correspondence, e.g., processes or inquiries that do not require a handwritten signature and do not contain any data worthy of protection, you can send an e-mail directly to the administrative staff known to you (usually vorname.nachname@stadt-hof.de) or to the functional mailbox of the responsible department (e.g., buergeramt@stadt-hof.de). These e-mails can also be sent to the central address post(at)stadt-hof.de. The following general conditions apply:
1. the city of Hof accepts documents in the case of informal letters in the following file formats:
- Text files in ANSI and ASCII format (*.txt)
- Rich Text Format (*.rtf)
- Microsoft Word for Windows from version word 2003 (*.docx)
- Microsoft Excel for Windows from version excel 2003 (*.xlsx)
- Portable Document Format (*.pdf)
- Joint Photographic Expert Group (*.jpg)
- Tag Image File Format (*.tif)
- Bitmap Pictures (*.bmp)
Other formats are permitted only with the express consent of the receiving agency. No automated procedures or programming (so-called macros) may be used in any of the permitted formats. In addition, these documents must not be protected by a password.
2. e-mails must comply with the Internet standard (SMTP, MIME) and use character sets commonly used in Western Europe.
3. e-mails are only accepted up to a size of thirty megabytes (incl. attachments).
4. if larger amounts of data are to be transmitted to the city of Hof, only the exchange platform "BayernBox" is permitted as a transmission channel. To use this platform, request an appropriate link from the recipient of the data to the City of Hof.
Data via other data exchange platforms such as weTransfer, Dropbox, OneDrive etc. will not be accepted by the City of Hof.
5. files in formats mentioned under point 2 can be reduced in file sizes (packed) by compression programs. The City of Hof accepts compressed files only as non-self-extracting ZIP archives (*.zip). Password-protected file archives are not accepted.
Mails that do not comply with the conditions of points 2 to 5 and mails that are recognized as spam by the software used by the City of Hof for filtering unsolicited e-mails (spam filter) or whose content may represent a security risk will be returned to the sender if a sender can be identified.
If, due to a legal requirement for written form, an application or a declaration must be made "in writing" (form-related letters), a simple e-mail is generally not sufficient for this purpose. However, you can still send these documents electronically to the City of Hof in accordance with the following requirements.
PDF document
With qualified electronic signature
One of the options is to apply a qualified electronic signature to the respective document and send it as an e-mail attachment to the address QES(at)stadt-hof.de. The qualified electronic signature must be integrated into the PDF document (PDF-inline). A prerequisite for this is that you have a qualified certificate for electronic signatures. Please note that a scanned signature does not meet the requirements for a qualified electronic signature. Even if a qualified electronic signature is used, the e-mail is transmitted unencrypted.
Secure contact form in the Bavaria portal
You can also use the secure contact form in the Bavaria portal to communicate confidentially with the city of Hof without the message being read by third parties. Here you can choose whether you want to authenticate yourself with the eID function of the new ID card and thus replace a mandatory written form, or whether you only want to communicate with the authority in an encrypted and secure manner and therefore only log in with a user name and password. Please note that in some cases it is still necessary to appear in person or the electronic form is excluded by law. In these cases, electronic processing is not possible. If you are unsure whether your request is admissible or processable electronically, contact the appropriate administrator in advance, who will be happy to assist you. If electronic communication has been opened, the City of Hof assumes that all communication can take place by this means, unless other regulations conflict with this. The above rules only apply to electronic communication with the City of Hof and not to references to offers from third parties, such as other authorities.
