What Is A “Questionable Address”?

A Questionable Address is one which is not complete or fully accurate, but in most instances will still be deliverable according to Canada Post’s SERP rules. Apartment building addresses are questionable if the mailing addresses do not have a unit number and there are no unit numbers available in the Canada Post reference database. Rural addresses are questionable if the mailing address cannot be validated based on all of the mailing address components present and are therefore validated based on the postal code only.

nCode indicates that an address is questionable by way of the secondary status code. If you are using the nCode Programmers Toolkit, this code is retrieved with the avc_get_second_status() API. If you are using nCode Web Services Edition, this code is the last character in the strStatus element of the web service response. A questionable apartment address has a second status of “A”. A questionable rural address has a second status of “R”.

Questionable addresses are considered valid and deliverable by Canada Post, but you are encouraged to resolve questionable addresses to make sure that they are truly complete and accurate in order to ensure that there are no deliverability problems.  The proportion of your addresses that are questionable in each category is reported on your Statement of Accuracy (SOA) report for Canada Post.

The questionable address rule was introduced by Canada Post in April 2010 and was first implemented in nCode version 9.0.

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