Patent ID: 8600912

Claim:
An electronic postal business postal system comprising: a network of secure system nodes having at least one processor and configured to communicate messages between the nodes; a collection subsystem consisting of a plurality of access portals, each access portal being associated with one or more of the system nodes and providing, to authenticated users that set up postal system accounts with user postal system electronic delivery addresses, access points to the system to send and receive over the secure system of nodes electronic business mailings that include one or more of user postal system electronic delivery addresses and physical delivery addresses; a plurality of message servers associated with the access portals, the message servers configured to process the electronic business mailings provided by the access portals to produce messages that include one or more of the user postal system electronic delivery address and the physical delivery addresses, and assigning to the respective messages identifiers that are unique over the system; a delivery subsystem associated with the access portals and configured to include one or more address registries that associate the respective user postal system electronic delivery addresses and the physical delivery addresses with the system nodes, the delivery subsystem further configured to enter the address registries using delivery address information in the messages, identify a destination node utilizing a locality of the physical delivery address when the physical delivery address cannot be associated with a corresponding user postal system electronic delivery address, provide routing information to the messages as system information, and route the messages over the secure system of nodes to the destination node as specified by the address registries; and a clearance subsystem configured to perform integrity checks using the identifiers assigned to the messages and allow further delivery of the messages that pass the integrity checks to the access portals.