Delivery Point Validation

Delivery Point Validation (DPV®) is a United States Postal Service® (USPS®) technology that validates the accuracy of address information down to the individual mailing address. By using DPV® to validate addresses, you can reduce undeliverable-as-addressed (UAA) mail, thereby reducing postage costs and other business costs associated with inaccurate address information.

Note: DPV® is only available for U.S. addresses.

Without DPV®, the address validation process only verifies that an individual address is within a range of valid addresses for the given street. For example, the USPS data indicates that the range of addresses on Maple Lane is 500 to 1000. You attempt to validate an address of 610 Maple Ln. Without DPV®, this address would appear to be valid because it is in the range of 500 to 1000. However, in reality the address 610 Maple Ln does not exist: the house numbers in this section of the street are 608, 609, 613, and 616. With DPV® processing, you would be alerted to the fact that 610 Maple Ln does not exist and you could take action to correct the address.

DPV® also provides unique address attributes to help produce more targeted mailing lists. For example, DPV® can indicate if a location is vacant and can identify commercial mail receiving agencies (CMRAs) and private mail boxes.

Although DPV® can validate the accuracy of an existing address, you cannot use DPV® to create address lists. For example, you can validate that 123 Elm Street Apartment 6 exists, but you cannot ask if there is an Apartment 7 at the same street address. To prevent the generation of address lists, the DPV® database contains false positive records. False positive records are artificially manufactured addresses that reside in a false positive table. For each negative response that occurs in a DPV® query, a query is made to the false positive table. A match to this table will stop DPV® processing.