Securing mail deliveries in a multi-tenant office building

Question

I am concerned that that postal mail (and other deliveries not requiring a signature) may be at risk from theft or unauthorised access. My company is based in a multi-tenant office with an unattended reception and no CCTV. When the postman visits, he buzzes one of the offices on the intercom who let him into the reception, where he leaves the mail on the reception desk.

Anyone with access to this reception (employees from the companies in the building, visitors, facilities staff, and so on), could pick up and walk away with anything that's left there. Since most of the people who work in this building don't use the main reception to enter the office, unattended items could be left there for several hours before being picked up.

I doubt that I could persuade our landlord to post a receptionist at the front desk, and there's nowhere that a set of lockable mailboxes could be installed (and they wouldn't be big enough to store the packages that are delivered). What other options are there?

Answer 1

• Make sure the postman buzzes your offices, and have a procedure to immediately go collect your mail.
• Figure out when the postman delivers (it's probably about the same time every day) and schedule someone to go down at that time.
• Arrange for your mail to be held at the post office, not delivered, and send someone to collect it every day.

Answer 2

The solutions are quite obvious:

1. Purchase a secure PO Box offsite,
2. Ask your postman (post a sign) saying please buzz your office for all deliveries addressed to you and send down staff to receive packages,
3. Move to your own place,
4. Hire a receptionist for the front desk yourself,
5. Install a shared locked mailbox (so visitors/facilities staff can't access -- only tenants and mail carriers),
6. Install a CCTV and pay someone to monitor it.

Frankly, ordinary postal mail is a fairly insecure system since any piece of mail is handled by many individuals, fairly easy to intercept/social engineer/bribe from a mailman, so you shouldn't entrust valuable secrets/irreplaceable documents to it. Most people are fine with this, e.g., your mailmen leaves mail in unlocked mailboxes at your house in many areas.

Answer 3

Set up a drop-box for the mailman, with a sign-out sheet for the keys to minimize the potential number of thieves and establish some pretense of logging.