Street Addressing for Your P.O. Box

 

The US Postal Service (USPS) offers a “Street Addressing Service for Your P.O. Box”. When you sign up for street addressing, you use the physical address of the Post Office (i.e. 123 Main Street) along with your P.O. Box number (i.e. # 27) as your address. Thus, your address would take the format:

John Q. Public
123 Main Street #27
Anytown, XX 12345

 

Street addressing for your P.O. Box allows you to have packages from common carrier services, such as UPS and FedEx, delivered to your P.O. Box. This provides security for your deliveries, avoiding packages sitting all day at your front door where they may be seen and stolen by any passerby with ill intent.

 

Additionally, street addressing for your P.O. Box provides you with a layer of privacy, letting you protect your home address from being disclosed in many cases. The application form for the street addressing option says: “You may not use the street address option as your physical residence or place of business in legal documents. Misuse of your street address in this manner may result in closing your P.O. Box and may be in violation of civil and criminal laws.” So, you probably shouldn’t try to use the street addressing option to conceal your address on government forms, but in almost any other case the street addressing option will be just fine.

 

Not every Post Office offers the street addressing option, but by checking the USPS web-site at https://www.usps.com/manage/po-boxes.htm you can probably find a Post Office near you that offers this “Premium P.O. Box Service.” To use the street addressing option you must of course first rent a P.O. Box, providing the required “two forms of ID and proof of your residence”. It is worth noting however that Federal law requires either a subpoena or a court order before the Post Office is allowed to release this information about you to a third party. So, your actual residence information on file with the USPS has some protection under the law.

 

It is also interesting to note that while you have to show proof of residence when you first rent a P.O. Box, the USPS doesn’t check on you every year to be sure that you haven’t moved. Likewise, when renting a P.O. Box the primary box holder must provide ID and proof of residence, but the form allows for several other names of individuals who will receive mail at the box to be listed. If you rented a P.O. Box just prior to changing your residence, your new home address would not be listed at the Post Office. Of course, this assumes that your new residence is close enough to your old one to allow you to still pick up your mail from the P.O. Box.

 

If someone rented the P.O. Box for you and added your name to the list of authorized mail recipients, your ID and residence address wouldn’t be associated with the P.O. Box at all (just your name). If this person was then moving out of the area, and maybe didn’t know your home address to begin with, this would add another layer of privacy to your receipt of mail.

 

So, for security of your mail and package deliveries, the Street Addressing Service for Your P.O. Box is an excellent idea. For adding an additional layer of privacy to your life, it has some advantages, and is something that you might want to consider based on your personal threat model.