Royal Mail Tracking API Available

Question

A curious one - when adding a Royal Mail package, the app displays that it's unable to provide tracking information as 'Royal Mail declines third party developers access to their tracking results'.

However, Royal Mail have a package tracking API available here, with a full OpenAPI specification. Can this be implemented in Delivieries?

Comments

Hello,

In order to facilitate, I provide the following tracking number:

*removed*

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

Thanks for your feedback!

I'm aware that Royal Mail has a proper API. Unfortunately, nothing changed in regards of who may use it - in order to gain access to the required API credentials, you need to supply a "10 digit Royal Mail Account number" (which I cannot get) and even then, API usage is limited to 50 request/day (with no indication on if/how this can be increased).

I've had multiple correspondences with their customer service to get an exception from this policy to no avail 

Comments

Has this been responded to already?

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The web based tracking has no limitations such as captcha.
Can't you just fake the browser queries? I've been using this technique for other websites in various apps I wrote.

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Thanks for your comment. Unfortunately, they still use captcha-based security for their tracking results (google reCaptcha and hCaptcha). As they use the "invisible" implementation, you usually do not see this as a user, but it still prevents (easy) automated access to their tracking results.