The Cartão de Cidadão PIN letter never arrived, and there's no way to track it

Our son can't get his first Cartão de Cidadão digitally, fine. We found a SIGA appointment on the other side of town, went there, everything went smoothly.

Then the letter with the PIN never arrived. We went to the Conservatória where the card was waiting. The card was there, but without the PIN they can't hand it over.

OK, an error, whatever. Requested a 2nd via, waited for a new PIN. That one never arrived either. We always get CTT mail normally, no issues with our address. The problem is the IRN sends these letters non-certified to save money, so there's no tracking, no way to know where the letter is or whether it was ever sent. The suggestion from the staff was to physically go to the CTT branch, ask them to hold any future IRN letter, and hope.

We then went back to the Conservatória to try again. Waited hours. The fichas ran out, even the priority ones. We bailed.

Eventually we went to a big Loja de Cidadão, paid 50 EUR, and got his Cartão de Cidadão with PIN codes create at the IRN HQ in Parque das Nações. Why wasn't this option offered at any point in the previous 5 to 15 hours we spent on this? At 50 EUR for what we went through, it's a steal.

The fix:

1. Send PIN letters as registered mail with tracking. The cost of the certified mail is nothing compared to the citizen hours wasted and the load on Conservatórias.

2. Allow PIN delivery via Chave Móvel Digital or the parents' authenticated identity, since both parents are already in the system.

3. When someone reports a missing PIN, proactively offer the paid same-day option at the IRN instead of letting them spend weeks chasing a letter that may never come.

4. There are plenty of ways to confirm an address that don't depend on a non-trackable physical letter.