CRA Online Mail: The Letter You Never Opened Still Counts as Received
There's no brown envelope anymore.
For years the advice was the same.
You get a letter from CRA, you don't panic, you send it to your accountant. Simple enough, because the letter physically showed up at your house or your office and somebody had to open it.
That's not how it works now. CRA moved to online mail as the default for business correspondence, and most business owners I talk to have no idea it happened. Which means the letter still arrives.
It just arrives somewhere nobody's looking. But here's what changed and what it means for you:
What CRA actually did
Two dates:
As of May 12, 2025, every new business number and program account registration started receiving correspondence online by default.
As of June 16, 2025, existing businesses were moved over too. That includes any business already registered for My Business Account, and any business that gave online access to a representative through Represent a Client. So if your accountant or bookkeeper has access to your account, you were switched, whether or not you ever logged in yourself.
What moved online is basically everything. Notices of assessment and reassessment, review letters, audit correspondence, collection notices, objection correspondence, forms, statements.
If CRA has something to say about your business tax accounts, it's in the portal.
The part that actually costs people money
This is the sentence to read twice:
Your correspondence is considered received on the day CRA posts it to My Business Account.
Not the day you read it.
Not the day you noticed the email.
The day it was posted.
CRA review letters usually give you a short window to respond, often around thirty days. That window starts running from the posting date. So if a letter went up in February and you found it in April, you didn't miss it by a little. You missed it entirely, and CRA's position is that you were told.
When you don't respond, CRA doesn't shrug. They assess based on what they've got, which generally means disallowing whatever they asked you to support. You end up with a bill, plus interest, for an amount you may not have owed at all if somebody had just sent them the receipts.
I've watched this happen. It's one of the most frustrating files to pick up, because the underlying tax position was fine. The mail was the problem.
Nobody is going to tell you
Here's the gap that catches people.
The email notification is something you have to set up. You provide an email address and register it for notifications. If nobody ever did that, you get nothing at all. No email, no letter, no phone call. The mail just sits there.
And the business got moved to online mail either way. Registering for notifications was never a condition of the switch.
It's also per program account. GST, payroll, corporate income tax. Setting it up on one doesn't cover the others, and I've seen owners who get notified about payroll and hear nothing about GST for a year.
Who actually has access to your CRA account
This one's worth ten minutes of your time this week.
Think about who can currently get into your My Business Account. Not who you think should have access. Who actually does.
Is it a bookkeeper you stopped working with two years ago? An office manager who left? An accountant you moved on from? Is the only email registered for notifications one that belongs to somebody who no longer works with you?
And on the other side, is it you? A surprising number of owners have never logged into their own CRA account, or can't remember the password if they have. That's a bad thing to discover on day twenty eight of a thirty day response window.
It’s happening on the personal side, too
Quick note if you also file a personal return.
CRA started moving some individuals from paper to online mail in September 2025, and as of February 9, 2026, notices of assessment and reassessment are available exclusively through CRA's portals if you have an account.
Same idea, different portal. If you don't have a CRA account, or you've set your preference to paper, CRA still mails you.
If you’re a sole proprietor, you’re in both systems
Sole proprietors get the fun version of this.
They’re across two accounts. Your GST and payroll accounts are business accounts, so they live in My Business Account and they went online with everything else.
Your personal return, your notice of assessment, your instalment reminders, those are in My Account.
Two portals. Two sets of notification settings.
And your business and personal tax situations are the same tax situation, which makes it especially annoying that the mail is in two places.
If you set up notifications on one and assume you're covered, you're not!
Alberta corporations have a second one
This is provincial.
This means it only applies if your corporation files in Alberta. But it's the same trap twice.
Effective April 1, 2026, Alberta's Tax and Revenue Administration moved to online mail through TRACS as the default for corporate income tax correspondence. Notices of assessment, reassessments, and statements of account go there now instead of in the mail.
And TRACS uses the same rule CRA does, which is that correspondence counts as received the day it's posted.
If you genuinely want paper back
You can ask for it!
For CRA business accounts, that's form RC681, and the request has to come from somebody with signing authority, meaning an owner, director, or legal representative. In Alberta, TRA has its own paper mail request form with the same kind of requirement.
I'll be honest, I'd rather you fix the notifications than go back to paper. Paper gets lost, forwarded to an old address, or opened by somebody who puts it in a pile. The portal is actually more reliable once somebody is watching it.
But if paper is what will genuinely get looked at in your business, take the paper.
And when something does show up
Send it to your accountant.
Don't answer it yourself, and don't call CRA to sort it out on the spot. Not because you can't handle it, but because these letters ask for specific things in specific formats, and a well meant answer that gives the wrong information or volunteers something extra is genuinely harder to undo than the original request was to answer.
One more thing while we're here. A real CRA email tells you that you have mail. That's all it does. It won't announce a refund, it won't ask for your SIN or your banking information, and it won't send you a link to enter anything. If an email is doing any of that, it's not CRA. Log into your account directly instead of clicking anything.
Go have a look
Honestly, this is the whole ask.
Pour a coffee, log into your CRA account and your My Business Account, and go poke around! You should be acquainted with that account.
So go see what's in the mail section. See whether there's an email registered for notifications, and whose it is. See whether it's set up on all of your program accounts or just one. If you're an Alberta corporation, do the exact same thing in TRACS.
And if you can't remember your password, you're in excellent company. Most people can't. That's usually the actual discovery, and it's a much better one to make on a Tuesday afternoon than in the middle of a thirty day response window.
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