System and method for mail destination address information encoding, protection and recovery in postal payment

A method of digital postage mark generation for a mail item, the method comprising the steps of:

• obtaining a destination address for a mail item;
• computing a recoverable portion C of the destination address;
• formatting the recoverable portion C in a cryptographic validation code along with other information of a digital postage mark;
• sending the digital postage mark to a control computer for formatting and printing;
• wherein the step of computing the recoverable portion of the destination address includes the steps of:
• formatting the destination address as an address string of characters;
• eliminating predetermined words and characters from the address string to form a first string ADDRESSSTRING;
• counting a number of characters N in ADDRESSSTRING and a number of numeric characters R in ADDRESSSTRING;
• eliminating all numeric characters from ADDRESSSTRING to obtain a second string ALPHAADDRESSSTRING containing N−R characters;
• selecting an offset S as a number between 0 and N−R−1, and a number M of recoverable characters;
• selecting M−R consecutive characters from ALPHAADDRESSSTRING beginning from the character S+1;
• forming a third string RECOVERABLEPORTION by taking R numeric and M−R alphabetic characters for a total of M selected characters;
• and
• formatting RECOVERABLEPORTION into the number C of the plaintext part of postal data of the digital postage mark.