Help building the largest human-edited directory of the web Suggest URL - Open Directory Project - Become an editor

directopedia.org uses links and structure from dmoz Open Directory Project.
The contents has been generating using technology developed by scientec.

This article discusses delivery couriers; for the font see Courier (font), for the mail transfer agent see Courier IMAP.

A courier is a person or company that delivers packages and mail, often between offices and generally in a shorter timescale than surface mail. In cities, some couriers will ride bicycles or motorbikes but most today use trucks and aircraft.

The term courier can also be used for a certain kind of robots, courier robots, that transport objects in a building (home, industry, and others).

There are many courier enterprises. The world's largest courier company is UPS followed by FedEx and DHL. Another sort of courier is a "cash-courier". This is someone who carries large amounts of cash money from one place to another (from one country to another) to avoid the normal financial circuit (where they risk being reported to an anti-moneylaundering authority) and thus launder money from an illegal origin.

History

Couriers of some kind have likely existed before first regular postal system has been invented. The first documented use of an organized courier service for the diffusion of written documents is in Egypt, where Pharaohs used couriers for the diffusion of their decrees in the territory of the State (2400 BC). This practice almost certainly has roots in the much older practice of oral messaging and may have been built on a pre-existing infrastructure.

Droomy :-)

See also

• Bicycle messenger
• Domotics
• Express mail
• Mail

This article is based on the article "Couriers" from Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia created and edited by online user community. This article is distributed under the terms of GNU Free Documentation License. Here you find the list of authors of this article. The article can only edited within Wikipedia. Edit this article in Wikipedia.