# General delivery (poste restante)

General delivery is post held at a post office counter until the addressee collects it: General Delivery, Poste Restante, Postlagernd. Spaw answers address_type general_delivery, weight 40.

Date: 2026-09-22

Updated: 2026-09-23

General delivery is post addressed to a post office rather than to a door, held at the counter until the addressee collects it in person — General Delivery in the United States and Canada, Poste Restante as the international term, Postlagernd in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, Fermo Posta in Italy, Lista de Correos in Spain.

## What Spaw answers

`address_type` reads `general_delivery`, and the words that said so land in `po_box` — `GENERAL DELIVERY` (Canada's `GD` is folded onto it, and a station written after it stays: `GD STN A` reads `GENERAL DELIVERY STN A`), `POSTE RESTANTE`, `POSTLAGERND` — while `is_po_box` stays false, because a counter is not a rented box. The line stands in for the street, so an address written as general delivery, a town and a postcode is valid without a street; with no street written there is no building to follow into a register, so `exists` stays null.

The `general_delivery` risk weight is +40, and unlike the [PO box](/glossary/po-box) weight it is not waived anywhere. The score measures how far an address is from somebody's own front door, not fraud: a counter is a real [delivery point](/glossary/delivery-point) a postal service serves, but nobody can be visited there and a courier cannot leave a parcel at it.

## Which spellings are read

The address rules name the general-delivery spellings of 19 countries' postal operators, and in those countries only those are read — Canada's bare `GD` among them, which counts only at the start of a line, Japan's 郵便局留 and 局留, and Australia's `CARE PO`. Everywhere else the two international spellings, General Delivery and Poste Restante, are read. A country's page in the [address checker](/tools/address-checker) lists the words its operator uses.

## What it is not

It is not a statement about the person collecting the post. General delivery is a service for anyone who cannot, or would rather not, receive post at a fixed address, and the answer describes the delivery point and nothing else.

Reference: https://spaw.co/glossary/general-delivery