You gotta be kidding me. DP every address is in the USPS directory. Yes. A street address on an envelope will get to the that address providing it is legit.
edit: even RR get delivered. Ernest T. Bass got mail.
@TheLoneMonk You are incorrect. As one example, my personal street address is not in the USPS database, which has caused some difficulties over the years. You should be sure you know what you are talking about, lest you give out bad information, which you just did.
I plugged in a non-existent address and it says, ”The address you provided is not recognized by the US Postal Service as an address we serve. Mail sent to this address may be returned.”
Yes, but you may get a response back asking to use the PO box. A lot of bigger companies direct mail to different boxes by department, since a letter may not always get to the intended person in a timely manner. After it sits on someone’s desk for a while, it may just get tossed.
Mail that addressed to me at the street address which is not in the database usually gets to my PO Box, but quite often carriers like Fedex initially refuse to deliver packages to me because submitting my street address to the database results in the error shown above in @jaytkay‘s post.
Not necessarily. If they have a change of address going to the PO Box then they’ll get their first class and periodical class mail forwarded. But the COA expires after a year (and just six months for periodicals). After that if the business address’s zip code is worked out of the same office where they hold their PO Box the carrier (who has the route with the business address) may bring that mail over to the box section for the clerk to put in their PO box. But standard procedure for mail that has an expired forwarding order is to endorse it as UTF (unable to forward) and send it back to thre sender.
If a local post office does not deliver to any addresses in a neighborhood as policy but rather requires patrons pick up mail at postal mailboxes, that address will not appear in a USPS mail database but that address is a must-have for UPS and FedEx —this can cause problems when different shipping options are available.
@jaytkay- No, you are not wrong. Post Office boxes are exclusively delivered to by the USPS. And in case some of you aren’t familiar what my occupation is, I’ve been a city letter carrier in the city of Sacamento for the past 25 years.