Patent ID: 7729359

Claim:
A delivery system for facilitating delivery of a physical article from a sending party to a receiving party while using a virtual address to preserve privacy of one or more physical addresses of the receiving party in relation to the sending party, the system comprising: a non-transitory computer readable medium storing: a plurality of virtual addresses, wherein the virtual addresses are fictitious addresses encoded as conventional delivery addresses, a plurality of physical addresses associated with the virtual addresses, wherein the physical addresses correspond to geographic locations capable of receiving deliveries of physical articles, and a plurality of permissions; and a service provider server running application software to perform a method of processing address information, the method comprising: receiving a request from a first party to receive one of the physical addresses associated with one of the virtual addresses provided from the receiving party to the sending party for delivery of the physical article to the receiving party, comparing the first party with the permissions, and if the first party is authorized by the permissions to receive the one of the physical addresses, providing the one of the physical addresses for delivery of the physical article to the one of the physical addresses without identifying the one of the physical addresses to the sending party, wherein the physical article is a package or envelope for delivery by a physical delivery system to the geographic locations.