Cite as: 534 U. S. 161 (2002)
Opinion of the Court
petitioner at the correctional facility where he was incarcerated. At that facility, prison mailroom staff traveled to the city post office every day to obtain all the mail for the institution, including inmate mail. App. 36. The staff signed for all certified mail before leaving the post office. Once the mail was transported back to the facility, certified mail was entered in a logbook maintained in the mailroom. Id., at 37. A member of the inmate's Unit Team then signed for the certified mail to acknowledge its receipt before removing it from the mailroom, and either a Unit Team member or another staff member distributed the mail to the inmate during the institution's "mail call." Id., at 37, 51.
Petitioner does not seriously contest the FBI's use of the postal service to send its certified letter to him, a method our cases have recognized as adequate for known addressees when we have found notice by publication insufficient.4 Tr. of Oral Arg. 11 ("This case is not really a mailed notice case because the procedures that are inadequate are the procedures that happened after the mailing"). Instead, he argues that the notice was insufficient because due process generally requires "actual notice" to interested parties prior to forfeiture, which he takes to mean actual receipt of notice.5 Brief for Petitioner 8, 15, 18-19; see also Tr. of Oral Arg. 23.
4 E. g., Mullane v. Central Hanover Bank & Trust Co., 339 U. S. 306, 319 (1950) (noting that the mails "are recognized as an efficient and inexpensive means of communication"); Walker v. City of Hutchinson, 352 U. S. 112, 116 (1956); Schroeder v. City of New York, 371 U. S. 208, 214 (1962); Mennonite Bd. of Missions v. Adams, 462 U. S. 791, 798 (1983); Tulsa Professional Collection Services, Inc. v. Pope, 485 U. S. 478, 490 (1988).
5 The Government's brief notes that the term "actual notice" is not free from ambiguity as used by this Court in cases such as Tulsa, supra, and by other courts. Brief for United States 20, n. 12 (stating that the term has been used both to distinguish notice by mail from notice by publication and to refer to the actual receipt of the notice by the intended recipient); see also Black's Law Dictionary 1087 (7th ed. 1999) (defining "actual notice" as "[n]otice given directly to, or received personally by, a party"). We think the best way to avoid this confusion is to equate, as petitioner does, "actual notice" with "receipt of notice."
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