Metering incoming deliverable mail

DETAILED DESCRIPTION This invention overcomes the disadvantages of the prior art by providing a system that indicates when normal digital postage meter mail or PSD mail is received by an addressee.
The foregoing is accomplished by connecting a scanner and control software to a digital postage meter or PSD mail processor that would read incoming digitally metered mail.
Instead of printing an indicia, the scanner would read the already existing indicia and other information on the mail piece and then extract the sender data fields that are contained in the indicia or on the mail piece.
The extracted mail data would be periodically uploaded to a data center.
The data center would compare the extracted data with mail sender data that has previously been uploaded from sending meters and processors to determine the delivery time of particular mail pieces.
In essence, originating meters and PSD mail processors would upload pertinent mail piece information on addressees, pointers or other identifiers automatically and periodically to a data center.
The recipient addressee of the mail piece would temporarily configure his digital postage meter or postal security device mail processor as a mail receiver so that the postage meter or mail processor would read the digital indicia that was affixed to the currently delivered incoming mail.
The incoming mail would be date/time stamped, opened (optionally) and the unique identifier that was placed in the postal indicia would be read.
The recipient meter or mail processor would periodically upload to the data center raw data on the unique identifiers or codes that have been received.
If the received unique identifiers or codes match with the sender unique identifiers or codes in a reasonable amount of time, as would normally be the case, the sent and received codes cancel out, or are kept for statistical information on delivery times, etc.
Non-matched codes could be flagged and reported to the originator for further investigation.
Thus, the data center may be able to locate mis-addressed or mis-routed mail and automatically feed back information on undelivered or undeliverable mail