Skip to content

Delivery point

published · September 10, 2026

A delivery point is the smallest unit a postal service delivers to: one letterbox, one door, one box at a counter.

A delivery point is the smallest unit a postal service delivers to: one letterbox, one door, one box at a counter. An address names a delivery point; a building may contain hundreds of them.

What Spaw answers

address_type names the kind of delivery point an address describes, in one of nine values: street, po_box, private_mailbox, general_delivery, rural_route, military, parcel_locker, bulk_mail or unknown. address_type_source says what settled it — address_rules when the operator's own naming conventions did.

Four of the nine carry weight on the risk score: a private mailbox +60, general delivery +40, a PO box +30 (zero in the nine countries where a box is the ordinary way to receive mail) and bulk mail +20. None of them is a fault. They are all real delivery points that a postal service serves; the weights exist because a parcel courier, a KYC check and a marketing list want different things from an address.

What the field is not

It is not a deliverability answer. Whether post actually arrives at a delivery point is a licensed check that this service does not run: deliverability_checked answers false and is_deliverable stays null rather than guessing.

And nothing in an address answer says who is behind the letterbox. The product is about places.

Related

markdown version: /glossary/delivery-point.md

Verify addresses the same way

The Spaw API runs every check described here on each lookup, with an SMTP handshake that never sends mail. 10 free lookups a month, no card required.

Get your API key

More glossary

  • ASN

    An Autonomous System Number identifies one network that announces its own routes to the internet under a single routing policy.

  • Address register

    An address register is a country's official file of every address its authorities recognise, usually keyed on buildings rather than letterboxes.

  • CIDR

    CIDR notation writes a range of IP addresses as one address and a prefix length, so 203.0.113.0/24 means the 256 addresses sharing those first 24 bits.

  • Catch-all domain

    A catch-all domain is one whose mail server accepts mail addressed to every recipient, whether or not that mailbox exists.

  • Check digit

    A check digit is a digit computed from the rest of an identifier so that a mistyped one usually fails arithmetic before anybody looks it up.

  • Company number

    A company number is the identifier a national registrar assigns to an incorporated company, unique within that register and never within the world.

  • Credit

    A credit is the billing unit of the whole API: one credit buys one fresh lookup that produced a usable answer, on any of the six signals.

  • Datacenter IP

    A datacenter IP is an address inside a range operated by a hosting, cloud or server provider rather than by a consumer access network.