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Delivery point

published · September 10, 2026 · updated · September 22, 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.

Each kind that is not a street has an entry of its own: PO box, private mailbox, general delivery, rural route, military mail, parcel locker and CEDEX, which covers the other business-volume arrangements too.

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

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More glossary

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    An area-code overlay is a new area code added over the same area as an existing one, instead of splitting it, so neighbours can hold different codes and local calls need ten digits.

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  • Number portability

    Number portability lets a subscriber keep a phone number when changing carrier. The number's block stays listed under the carrier it was issued to, so block data names the original holder.