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Learn what Paper Channel is and how it fits into the PagoPA notification platform.

Architecture

Understand the service architecture, components, and AWS integrations.

Quickstart

Set up a local development environment and send your first request.

API Reference

Explore the full internal and back-office API surface.

What is PN Paper Channel?

PN Paper Channel is a Spring Boot microservice within the PagoPA (Piattaforma Notifiche) ecosystem. It manages the full lifecycle of paper correspondence — registered mail and certified letters — sent to Italian citizens as legal notifications. The service handles:
  • Prepare phase — validates the delivery request, resolves recipient addresses via National Registries, and computes delivery costs based on active tender contracts
  • Send phase — submits validated requests to External Channel for physical dispatch and registers the cost
  • Event processing — consumes SQS events from postal operators, applies business rules per status code, and forwards progression events to Delivery Push

Paper Delivery Flow

Two-phase prepare/send lifecycle

Tenders & Costs

Procurement contracts and postal pricing

Queue Events

SQS-based status event processing

Address Resolution

Multi-step address lookup and fallback

Local Development

Run the service with LocalStack

Configuration

All application properties explained

Key capabilities

Delivery requests are split into a prepare step (address resolution, cost calculation) and a send step (submission to External Channel). This decoupling allows callers to validate and cost a request before committing to dispatch.
Postal costs are managed via procurement contracts (tenders) that define per-product, per-zone pricing with weight-based ranges. The back-office API and a dedicated Lambda function expose full CRUD operations for tender management.
Incoming delivery status codes (RECAG, RECRN, PNAG series) are processed by a chain of specialized message handlers. Each handler applies Italian postal regulation rules and delegates to downstream services such as Delivery Push and Safe Storage.
Recipient addresses are encrypted at rest using AWS KMS via the AWS Encryption SDK. Address de-anonymization is performed on-demand through the Data Vault microservice.
When a recipient address is not available, Paper Channel queries the National Registries service (ANPR/INA) to resolve the current physical address before attempting delivery.

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