What is the minimal possible UK address?
microblog.vladh.netOlga was a famous doorkeeper at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden.
Students used to send her postcards from their journeys.
It became so popular that it was enough to write "Olga, Sweden" for her to get the letters [0] (source in swedish).
The Duke of Wellington's address, Apsley House, was famously:
1, London
Funny story: Back in the 1950s, my father went on a rugby tour to the Soviet Union. One of his team mates wrote a postcard back to his mum with an address of:
Mrs Williams,
Clynderwen
"Clynderwen" being the little village he came from. My dad said, "You can't just put that". He, none too bright, said "Why not? There's only one Clynderwen", and posted it.
6 months later, and about 5 1/2 after the end of the tour, it arrived. All over it were notes saying things like "Unknown in Hong Kong. Try Australia".
> 6 months later, and about 5 1/2 after the end of the tour, it arrived. All over it were notes saying things like "Unknown in Hong Kong. Try Australia".
Man, that's some serious organizational ethic! If only both companies and people were as exact today...
Is this not basically once-off nerd-sniping for post workers... "ooh: here's a challenge."?
I'm sure you only hear about the success stories.
In my case it was an embarrassing success story... my great uncles name was globally, or at least unique in Germany, i misspelled it, got the postcode wrong, forgot street and house number (sent from abroad)... and it arrived a month or so later. Boy got I laughed at. I'd rather wished it had disappeared. Thats was back in the 90's.
Some other embarassing success story. My gf bought a postcard in Czech Republic, filled it with my address in Warsaw, but forgot to buy poststamps.
She didn't send the postcards and carried them to Warsaw. In Warsaw they fell out of her pocket on a street, or something like that.
Still, they arrived in our post box. We still don't have an idea how and why :)
If it was already in Warsaw, it's possible some bored civilians found the postcard and decided to go to your address and put it in the mailbox...
Haha, I can imagine some post-master and his workers' eyes glinting with excitement once they find a letter of this sort. "Ooooh, unmarked letter... It's showtime!"
There's the story from last year of a letter being delivered that only had a description of the person and where the person used to live:
and also this letter / package addressed with broken encoding, decoded by the postal service.
We received a letter from a friend in France, in the 2000s, addressed to Wellington but no country specified. Also present were an nz postmark and "try great Britain".
This is the most british-ish written post I have ever read, and now my internal dialog is stuck on the british accent setting.
Ill never forget my great aunt amy (my grandmothers sister, they were both canadian by birth in 1923-time)
"Grandma, I didnt know Amy was british!?"
"Neither did we dear, neither did we"
(My great aunt would talk with a British accent)
Family fact - my uncle (Amy's son) went to school with Bill and Paul in Seattle and we have a pic of them together...
You should reconfigure that dialog to Welsh ;-)
Back then Canada was still a Dominion of the British Empire so they were British, at least legally. That changed with the Balfour Declaration of 1926.
Isn't this how IP addresses work?
No 8.8.8.8 here, try over there ...
Not really. As far as I understand it the routing tables should always point you in the right direction for an IP address.
A routing table being a list pairing an address to a location. Same with addresses. You need to know where London is or the next post hub where to send the letter.
Also in Sweden, before the invention of postal codes the shortest address was "Bo i Bo". There was a person named Bo living in a village named Bo, and "i" is Swedish for "in".
I mentioned in the other thread about Costa Rican addresses that I met the Vatican priest/Latin grammarian/Latin magazine editor Cleto Pavanetto (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleto_Pavanetto) around 2008 at a spoken Latin event. (Latin was the only language we had in common!)
He told me that he could get successfully receive mail addressed to
I was pretty impressed!Cletus VaticanI spent the first couple years of my life in a small town in Ireland. Small enough that the houses had names, not numbers — my parents were Tolkien fans, and ours became "Lorien".
I'm told that letters were addressed simply, "Lorien, [town name]"
I’d often send postcards to “Grandma, 14130 [Village name]”. Based on my signature, the mailman would know which grandma to distribute it too. That’s what belonging to a land is like. Our kids probably won’t be able to say which country we are from.
For her whole life, my grandma would receive any mail sent to her full name and zip code. Since it was a small town and everyone at the post office knew her.
Not as impressive as Olga, of course, but close!
My wife grew up in a small town. I met her in university and before the summer break I asked for her address to write to her (this was in the 90s and although I had email by then, she didn't). She assured me that her first name and the town was enough, since all the mail for the town went to the shop across the road from her house and everyone knew her.
There was a time in the 60s when letters to "Daniel, Paris" went to Daniel Filipacchi.
Legend has it that when he was director of music at Eton College, a postcard was delivered to Ralph Alwood from China simply addressed: "Ralph, Eton"
I can recall a letter from Japan being delivered with "Wolfram, Eton, England" on it. So I believe the parent comment!
I once received a letter (while at Chalmers) from the US - it was addressed to <my name> S-41296
KTH's official address is just KTH, 100 44 Stockholm. But since the '10' prefix already implies Stockholm [1], you could feasibly shorten it to just '100 44'.
Actually, it looks like Chalmers is the same way - the address in the footer of their website is just "Chalmers University of Technology, 412 96 Gothenburg" (with the '41' prefix already implying Gothenburg).
[1] https://www.postnord.se/vara-verktyg/sok-postnummer-och-adre...
Not that I send many paper letters any more, but long ago I took to simply writing my return address as my (unique) last name and zip code which has worked a few times (not that I’d know of any failure cases).
For US post office boxes you can just write the full 9-digit zip code.
My dad's Uncle Bill was a quite well-known rugby player at one time, and received letters addressed just to "Bill $surname, Wales".
My uncle got mail to his name, Cambridge. They tried the University, which routed to him.
Ah Mr Cormack, good to hear you chiming in here... Reminds me of the time I successfully received a letter in Cambridge, addressed with only nine characters: my initials, the initials of my college, plus CB2 was enough to get it there.
Oh, and: mokas farakas!
I am the only person in my country with my fullname. I have a couple of time received letters addressed to "My fullname, country"
I wonder if a sufficiently famous, public, and unique name could get delivered. Would a letter simply addressed “Biden” make it to the White House?
Fun fact: depending on your local postal unit, God/Santa letters can be slung around to local volunteers: https://faq.usps.com/s/article/What-does-USPS-do-with-letter...
""Dear God" letters are sent to Mail Recovery offices or local churches."
I'll bet "Rishi Sunak" would get to 10 Downing Street.
Although that's also an address with it's own postcode, so "SW1A 2AA" would also get there.
Many buildings in London actually have multiple postcodes. In general UK postcodes are granular enough that almost any combination of a name and code should make it, save for situations like several people with identical names living in flats that are fewer than N floors apart.
Postcodes are designed to facilitate sorting and last mile delivery so no surprise if large buildings have multiple codes. DVLA in Swansea has several, probably because they get a lot of post in a few distinct categories.
I'll bet "Rishi Sunak" would get to 10 Downing Street.
I wonder if random mail sent to top level politicians actually gets to them. The intention is clear, yes, but there's probably layers of security that will prevent it from getting to its intended address...
Almost all paper mail received by politicians in Canada is read by their staffers. You'll get a form reply, at a minimum. Some actually do read a lot of it. Whether curated by staffers, or a random selection, or both. I imagine it depends on the individual politician. Some do reply.
R B Bennett, Canadian PM from 1930 - 1935, was an eager correspondent with random people across the country. He read and wrote tens of thousands of letters throughout his career. During the Depression he would include cash from his personal wealth in the envelopes if people described hardships. I wonder if that would be seen as vote-buying today but it was probably genuine charity.
I don't believe that basic tendency has really changed. Some politicians do genuinely want to be close to the people and random conversations and letters with ordinary people are one way to do that. And seeming approachable is useful politically, if nothing else. Some want nothing to do with the filthy masses, of course.
For mail to the U.S. president, it goes to a facility near the White House where it’s screened, sorted, replies are sent (usually selected from a set of pre-generated forms) and (depending on the incumbent) a handful are brought to the president’s personal attention.
I sent Clinton an invitation to my high school graduation party, and got a letter back that said good luck in college.
I used to work in the correspondence unit of 10 Downing St. Very few letters made it as far as the PM's desk, but all letters received a response.
If it's a reasonable letter, I doubt the way it's addressed makes any difference.
Members of Parliament have a duty to listen and respond to their constituents, which in Sunak's case is the people of Richmond, North Yorkshire. I don't live there, but I have lived in a senior government minister's constituency in the past. I wrote one letter, and I did get a reply — I doubt my letter was directly read by the minister, but it was probably tallied up by an assistant "15 letters supporting this so far, 8 against".
The difficulty these days is the volume. Rory Stewart (an ex-MP) mentioned on his podcast recently that one of his predecessors in his seat in IIRC the 1950s got about 5 letters a week to deal with; when Rory was an MP in the 2010s he was getting over 20,000 emails a year. It's much easier to have a personal touch in correspondence at 5 a week!
That's about 55 per day, or a little over 100 per working day. Perhaps too many for a detailed personal response for each, but certainly enough to read. Categorising well for future action, response, ongoing follow-up, a part of a staff member's job.
Perhaps, but how much time do we want MPs to devote to reading correspondence versus all the other aspects of their job, such as holding constituency surgeries, reading up on legislation, doing ministerial jobs (which Stewart was at this time), and so on? Especially when a significant fraction of the incoming emails will be the result of some campaign group or another having encouraged its supporters "write to your MP" with a template letter with set of suggested arguments...
I also doubt the way it is addressed makes a difference.
I doubt my letter was directly read by the minister,
We seem to be in agreement.
I wonder if a letter addressed to “Liz Truss” would have got there in time for her to still be in residence.
Don’t know about others but Reagan used to respond to a lot of letters people sent. He complained that it usually took months through the bureaucracy.
Excellent book has a collection of such letters.
“Reagan: A Life In Letters“
Likewise "W1A 1AA" would get to the BBC's London Broadcasting House.
It works for Santa !
Some brilliant examples of postal detective work in Ireland documented here https://www.quora.com/Can-you-send-mail-in-Ireland-with-the-....
eg
Petra Kindler and Donal Moore
Unfortunately I forgot the street name
but it's near a street named *Cul de Sac*
The beautiful city of Waterford,
well known for its kindly postmen
IRELANDMy favourite was the one addressed simply “Gobshites”, with no further details.
It was successfully and correctly delivered to the Dáil (the lower house of the Irish parliament).
ETA: source —- https://www.her.ie/amp/lol/unbelievable-this-letter-made-it-...
I wonder how they determined it was for that pack of gobshites, and not the band[1]. Penmanship? Cheery stamp?
Attitude? I’d imagine a fan would be more careful with the address. Someone who addresses a letter with “Gobshites” is likely pissed off at something.
Fair point.
That is legitimately spectacular.
Saw someone on a canal forum in the UK recently who documented how they'd received a letter addressed simply [Name of Boat] [Name of town they were in a few weeks earlier ] via a combination of a postman and a boater who knew which direction they were headed in.
Just as well their boat wasn't called Kingfisher or Meander...
I've had An Post deliver some that weren't just partially addressed, but wildly inaccurately so.
The most notable example was addressed to "correct name, house number (no street), wrong city entirely". It arrived two days late, unopened.
I like to imagine there's a little old lady sat in a sorting office somewhere, who simply knows everyone's business. Everyone's.
I personally received a letter to: "Fergal Reid, Longford, Ireland", in the late 90s. Ireland had no postcodes at the time.
I lived in a small village on the edge of a county called Longford; my name isn't that unique in Ireland.
The funny thing about the story, is that the letter was posted in the Philippines, and was physical spam mail, trying to hook me into some sort of scam. They had pulled the partial address from a domain name record. No idea how the economics of that worked!
There was a submission on here a while back with someone using weird addresses etc. One required a cross word to be filled in and it got delivered.
came into the comments to post this, or see if anyone had. couldn't find the URL using the sitewide search.
I don't think that was the one. I'm fairly sure it was based in the UK.
I found this
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/devon/6226641.stm
But that isn't it either.
There's also the fun story of the letter addressed via a map, to "a horse farm with an icelandic/danish couple and 3 kids and a lot of sheep!" - https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-37233913
I correctly received a similarly-addressed letter, and was fairly impressed that it made its way to me.
Mate of mine used to have conversations with the postman on postcards that while while they were addressed to us ALL the text was directed towards the postman. It's been over 30 years. But they'd read something like; "Hi Mr.Postman, hope you're having a good day. The weather here is quite lovely. I've been drinking quite a bit. How's your rounds going? Hope it hasn't been raining too bad? Have you broken in the new boots yet? I hear you're getting new bicycles?" Then the answers would be written in tiny writing in between the questions.
Since Ireland got what we're calling eircodes (post codes for Ireland) we can now have a house level address in 7 chars. So mine is Xxx XXxx I really must try and send myself something with JUST that on the label?! With a wee apology on the back for taking the piss.
In the US, someone I know who had a Post Office box liked writing simply `box-number zip-code` as their address.
It worked. Eg, if you wrote on an envelope:
1034
21240
But it looks cooler with just two numbers. Especially it did 20 years ago when my friend did it. Very futuristic cyberpunk. Maybe a square glyph for "box" would be good.
This is true. As others have pointed out, all PO Boxes can be appended to a 5 digit zip to get to the box (e.g. ZIP-BOX#) No city or state should be needed (zip covers that), nor name (not needed for mail in general, but might cause other issues).
The US Postal System actually uses a full 11 digit number to identify a "Delivery Point". The "+4" after a zip code is basically a subroute within that zip code, but there are two numbers after that you don't really see that will identify the full delivery point, which is basically a mailbox. The USPS tracks a number of things at this delivery point level, including whether a secondary address is needed, if they are currently delivering to that address, or if service is temporarily suspended (potentially due to a natural disaster or road outage in the case of a more remote rural address).
I'd really love to see if just a full 11 digit number is enough to get mail delivered to my house. I guess I could try, as it's easier than you'd think to find out your code
Dang, I came to post my ultra lean address from years ago, but wish I had known this!
PO 1234 NY, NY 10010
Do you think removing all instances if NY would have still got the mail delivered? 10010 is NY in NY.
As of reading the posts above, it sounds like yes! Very neat, and I'll be trying it with my hometown PO box soon.
In many cases, the PO box number becomes the suffix of ZIP+4 so you could probably write 21240-1084. I have friends use this nine digit number as their return address.
Note: the real barcodes use 11 digits. There are two extra digits beyond the Zip+4 that encode the stop along the route. The Zip+4 gets you to the block but then you need two more digits to specify the house/apartment etc. If you can decide the barcodes sprayed on the front of the envelope by the USPS, you'll find the extra two digits. But the Zip+4 that everyone knows isn't that precise.
My ZIP+4 describes exactly three houses - we're all on one side of one given block. I'm trying to figure out the minimum amount of info the delivery person would need to find my house among the other two.
Is it cheating if I put a photo of the house on the envelope?
Zip+4 + delivery point is for the set of mailboxes. If you each have individual mailboxes (not clustered), the 11 digit code is enough. Or house number plus scrawl plus zip+4.
We're individual units. House number was my choice, and that's 3 digits. Trying to figure out if I get it to one alphanumeric character. First letter of my last name might do it.
WOW!
I was excited to learn PO box numbers are unique in my city and have their own ZIP code so theoretically mail could reach me with an address of only "37939-0002" (ZIP only) or "PO Box 2, Knoxville" (no ZIP) if someone wants to test it out. I'll send something fun in reply.
No state either? Would they know which state to route that to? I think yours is the largest but apparently there are a bunch of cities in the US with that name.
The replies here are close, but not exactly right. Zip codes largely map to individual post offices. Once mail gets to the correct post office, then it will get sorted into routes for delivery.
The reason why the distinction of post offices is important is that zip codes are not required to follow state boundaries (technically, zip codes aren't an area, but a list of delivery points). In fact, there are a lot more than you'd think that span across state lines, so there may actually be a mismatch between the state for your address and the state for the post office your mail is delivered by.
Zip codes are nation-scoped, not state-scoped, so yes they'd know which state.
What I meant is: if you address to just "Knoxville" how would they know it's the one in Tennessee?
I suspect that would work for the Knoxville you are in, but not from one Knoxville to another.
ZIP is inclusive of state
But (no ZIP) isn’t a ZIP
I can confirm that "<Room Number> New York New York, Las Vegas, Nevada 89109" doesn't work. They wanted the actual street address of the hotel. Which surprised me, as I'm used to big hotels being well-known enough that you can just write a room number, hotel name and city and have it arrive in the right place.
I wonder if it would have worked at a hotel that does not share the name of a place.
No, it almost certainly has to do with the local postal workers not wanting to put out the effort. If the zip code is there, it will usually be sent to that particular post office first.
That particular hotel is some distance outside Las Vegas, too, in Paradise NV
As noted above, ZIP+4 uniquely identifies most (all?) US PO Boxes, so theoretically provides everything the post office needs to make the delivery.
For what it's worth, I've personally mailed an envelope addressed only to my PO Box ZIP+4 with no return address, and it worked.
Note, however, that abbreviated "addresses" of this type violate USPS's published guidelines, so they may be rejected by automated mail sorting systems and therefore delayed, or, especially in cases where discounted bulk rates apply, rejected altogether.
In other words, YMMV.
Futuristic? Mate, you've just invented physical versions of phone numbers.
At my college dorm I was able to receive mail sent to:
LikeRoom number 9-digit zip
It may have helped that all mail to that 5-digit zip went to the school, and its mail room people might have had more time on their hands than the USPS.219 65432-9876I worked with someone who painted and mailed a bunch of bagels. As in the bagels you toast and eat. As in a stamp stuck onto a painted bagel with the address written with marker. They all got to their destinations.
My parents went to Hawaii a couple of years ago and mailed a coconut to my house. Turns out that it's a whole thing:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/you-can-mail-coconut-a...
Oh man I love this. Thanks for sharing.
Its potentially possible for individuals/orgs too.
The post office standard mentions something to the effect "If a firm name is assigned a unique ZIP+4 then it must be used" (rather than just the zip code).
Which implies its possible for a "firm" to get their own zip+4 number and that by itself is probably sufficient for the automated mailing system to identify the recipient.
The ZIP+4 is intended to be a redundant checksum against the name+address (which doesn't strictly require a zip code for handwritten/non bulk mail), so presumably a bunch of "hacks" work in the post office system as well.
AKA, for a lot of rural/etc places just a name and a basic zip code probably works/etc.
When I was living in Dubai a decade ago, the PO box numbers were unique across the country, and there is no postal delivery service, so that's the only way to receive post[0]. Usually you'd use your work's PO box for the rare time you get post (typically AliExpress) but I was freelancing so had to rent my own.
My address was simply "12345 UAE" from anywhere in the world. I typically had to add more detail, as address forms would not let me enter only these fields.
[0] Couriers would of course come to your building. Typically the address you gave would include directions "Near Yacht Club" as street names were not always clear.
My family lives in a rural community where most people know everyone's name. So I have successfully sent a postcard to myself across the US with simply my first name and the zip code.
YMMV depending on the driver
Or post office worker anyway. There isn't actually a "driver" involved, the PO Box is in the post office identified with that zip code, the only driving involved is to get it to that building in the first place!
A bunch of US zip codes are for PO Boxes only, so this seems to stand a strong chance of working, at least in those places.
Not only are their PO Box only zip codes, but there are also zip codes that are associated with various business and government entities. In those cases the USPS literally doesn't care what you put for the address bc they will hand over all the mail addressed to that zip code to the entity and let them handle it.
The most famous example of this is the zip code 12345, which is actually for GE in Schenectady, NY.
The IRS also has some of these dedicated 5-digit ZIP codes. For example, 00501 is the IRS processing center in Holtsville, NY. (According to Wikipedia, this is also the lowest-number ZIP code currently in use in the US.)
Even more interestingly, most IRS ZIP codes are unique from their surrounding cities' (e.g. 70001 within 78xxx surroundings).
I remember working with SagePay as a payment provider back in 2008 (before we knew of Stripe!) and finding it interesting that card address validation was only done on the numbers in a full address.
For example, from "20 Windsor Road, London, SE1 6JH" it would extract 2016 and validate that against the banks details.
I thought that was quite a smart way as UK addresses can come in all forms, shapes and sizes (as the post shows) – but the minimal bits required to be correct are indeed the numbers as all postcodes have them and an incorrect number would mean a incorrect postcode.
Edit: the funny bit was that they made you work this out and send it along with the request rather than just handling it internally :)
How would it work where the house has a name instead of a number e.g. Wisteria cottage, Bristol, BS1 1AA?
I presume that ‘hashes’ to 11.
Correct. Which means if you’re taking deliveries it’s probably better to have a house number as you get validated more frequently.
I live on a road where all the houses on one side were built first and numbered 1 2 3 4... The houses on the other side were built later and have names and no numbers.
It would just be 11
They can be shorter.
"I am sure some postcodes only contain one house number, in which case you could use just the postcode as your address, which would be quite cool. "
Indeed.
There are 55,540 full postcodes in England and Wales that contain only one household.
This would mean you could just send the letter to the postcode itself.
Source: https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/fre...
Some very large organisations have also their own postcode.
For example, if you want to write to HMRC about your self-assessment the address is: BX9 1AS, and that's it.
Edit: moreover, BX is the non-geographic code, whereas 'normal' postcode start with a geographic code, which is usually an abbreviation of the town.
There are a couple of buildings in the US with their own zip code. The White House is one, as is the Empire State building.
The Pentagon manages to have at least 6 zip codes assigned to it (each branch has its own zip code).
It’s mildly annoying that there are 6 branches in The Pentagon
In the UK, with its more granular postcodes, office buildings can have one or more postcodes per floor.
I remember CGP Grey talked about staying with his wife's family in rural Hawaii, on his Cortex podcast. His address included something like "take a left at the big tree".
The additional complication was that the USPS wouldn't deliver to the house, so they got a PO box, which is common in rural areas. But the USPS won't allow private carriers to deliver to PO boxes. So you need to use a different address depending on which carrier is taking the package. A lot of stores (Amazon!) won't tell you which carrier they're going to use!
So he would see packages slowly make their way to his island, then be marked as undeliverable, then slowly make their way back. Eventually Amazon stopped allowing him to ship packages at all.
I recall that Costa Rican addresses are more like directions:
https://www.crcdaily.com/p/why-doesnt-costa-rica-use-real-ad...
At least for the neighboring country (Nicaragua) it's like that. Sometimes the reference points are not even there anymore, as in the case of some old buildings destroyed in the Managua earthquake in '72
>The additional complication was that the USPS wouldn't deliver to the house, so they got a PO box, which is common in rural areas. But the USPS won't allow private carriers to deliver to PO boxes. So you need to use a different address depending on which carrier is taking the package. A lot of stores (Amazon!) won't tell you which carrier they're going to use!
Two options:
* Specify both the PO box and street address in the mailing address, like
John Q. Public
PO Box 123
1 Main Street
Anytown USA 00600
This is best for situations where you don't know which carrier the sender will use. People who live in rural areas where they have both a PO box (because USPS won't deliver to their homes) and a valid street address that other carriers do deliver to might use this option.
* USPS PO boxes can receive from other carriers, if street addressing is used. <https://www.usps.com/manage/po-boxes.htm#streetaddress>
That's basically what he ended up doing, except that the address and PO box had different ZIP codes. Also any store that does address validation wont allow that.
Another reason why addresses should just be multi-line text boxes.
When we moved into our newly built house, the USPS wasn't quite ready for us and it took a couple months for them to recognize and validate our address. Fedex and UPS had no such problem. We had to order a bunch of stuff off of Amazon, and a couple of those packages were sent back by USPS. I contacted Amazon and they set it so all packages were sent via UPS and Fedex for a while.
Meanwhile, google maps already added all the streets for a new subdivision near me that hasn't even finished grading the terrain yet. It's funny to watch a doordash driver pull down a dead-end street that LOOKS like it ought to connect to mine, and then back out, take a massive detour, and enter my neighborhood from the exact opposite side.
This is a fantastic post & I love mail art and experimenting with the mail. One thing I learned in the USA is that while a card can be 3x5 (LxW) it cannot be 5x3 (i.e. oriented in "portrait") because the machines aren't set up to read it that way. However, you can add $.20 in additional postage and write "No machine" so they hand-cancel the stamp rather than using the machine. This is useful for any time you don't want them running the letter through the cancelling machine.
At the risk of opening myself up to having postal workers kick in my door and charge me with a federal crime: one experiment I tried was to stamp a postcard addressed to me, cover the address with a card with my friends address on it, shrink-wrapping it and sending it to them. The stamp does not get canceled because of the plastic wrap & the reply can travel back to me on the same stamp. (basically: "yes you can cover a stamp with plastic to avoid cancellation then reuse it.")
One nit I'd pick with the author here is that the address style he uses does not adequately route the letter to him. He states that all the mail in his building goes into one box, so if this were not something he was expecting and it arrived for him, there would be no way to route it to the correct person once it reached the building. I suppose in the more general case, assuming a single family household, this method would work. Cool post in any event!
while a card can be 3x5 (LxW) it cannot be 5x3...add $.20 in additional postage and write "No machine"
This is without a doubt the most useless bit of information I've gotten in more than a decade and I cannot wait to try it out. Awesome and thank you.
Nonmachinable mail can be all sorts of shapes as well. I've had a lot of fun cutting cardstock into silhouettes and irregular polygons and mailing them.
When I moved, I sent postcards notifying people of my new address in the shape of my new state. US mail is quite flexible thanks to the nonmachinable surcharge.
Yes I should have mentioned that. If you want to send any weird shape or a piece of wood or something (I recently sent some postcards I'd cut from raw veneer/scrap from a sawmill) the no-machine/hand-cancel fee is the ticket.
I'm sure it depends a bit on the delivery and sorting offices involved. The UK (I'm an ex-pat) seems to be WAY better than the US at this - it seems they really want to deliver the mail and make an effort to do so, vs here in the US where it's almost the opposite - like they are looking for any excuse NOT to deliver. I had one returned to sender since the post office wouldn't figure the missing town from the zip code!
I've read stories of letters to rural areas in UK where "so & so, sheepstown" is enough to get it delivered since the carrier knew who so & so was. As a kid in the UK I remember once asking for a refund on a can of hot-dogs that was one short, by sending a note on a greasy chinese take-out lid without even adding a stamp to it. The post office delivered it, and I got my refund!
> I had one returned to sender since the post office wouldn't figure the missing town from the zip code!
Well, here in the UK the norm (for non-commercial mail) is not to include a return address on the outside of the envelope.
To return something to the sender, they have to open it and hope they find an address inside. Much easier to just deliver it!
> Well, here in the UK the norm (for non-commercial mail) is not to include a return address on the outside of the envelope.
Huh? I was always taught to put your address on the back.
Yes, I always put my address on the back of parcels (who sends letters?).
I also always use the short form: house number and post code.
Is this a good method? No idea. Decades of sending parcels. None failed to arrive, so no attempts to return to sender.
This Tom Scott video shows some of the surprising (to me) lengths to which the USPS does go to figure out the right address: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxCha4Kez9c Obviously this doesn't apply to your case, but I certainly didn't think they'd have a national center for decoding terrible handwriting.
Interesting, but you'd think that even these OCR fallout cases could be automated by neural net (I'd expect super-human performance on a task like this), especially since they have the training data right there.
It's cool how well integrated this is with the sorting centers where each mail piece actually is, so that the cases they handle essentially flow thru (with a retry attempt) as normal.
I've got to wonder why my piece with missing city but 100% legible otherwise-complete address including ZIP was still returned to sender. Seems it may have been policy for a certain class of mail (this was international registered, with a tracking number printed on it). In this case, to make matters worse, despite having themselves returned it to overseas sender, they then kept on sending me updates on their failure to locate it when I asked them to track it!
A Royal Mail letter posted without a stamp would likely lead to an insufficient postage card being delivered which would require the postage + £1 attaching to it for the letter to be released.
Clearing out some old stuff from my grandparents, grandpa had at some point received a letter, from Stockholm, to their summer house in the woods addressed
Thorvald
The forest by <tiny village in Sweden>My parents, living in rural Norway, received a postcard simply addressed to their first names, Norway.
It turned out they were the only couple with that exact combination of first names, and someone at the Norwegian Post were bored enough to ask the Folkeregisteret (the database in which all Norwegians are listed) whether there were any Jorunns living with any Ingolfs anywhere in the country.
I remember from one of my first jobs, we received a vacation postcard addressed to:
- Dear friends - Lange voorhuid - Holland
.... Lange voorhuid was a mis-spelling of the streetname: "Lange Voorhout", which is someone unique to The Hague... but didn't have a housenumber (and it's a long street). Still, the postcard arrived at our company before the sender got back from vacation.
The dutch postal service is honestly kinda impressive with this sort of thing. I'm pretty sure they keep a name-address database or some such, because mis-addressing a letter will still almost always get delivered correctly based on the name.
IIRC it's fairly recently they stopped delivering to non-postal addresses. i.e. until recently you could address something to "The green house next to the church" and it'd get there.
I've seen things done like that here in the US also. Something like...
It works, sometimes. I think it's up to the postal carrier if they want to really try or not.First Name, Last Name Blue house down by the creek, next to a yellow shed State, Town, ZipThat's why it pays to be extra nice to your postal carrier. I've gotten a couple of packages delivered where the international sender clearly had no idea what a US postal address looked like, my name was completely mangled, but the zip code got it to the local post office and my carrier apparently said "there's only one person on the route who gets packages like that".
I once received a post card from my little sister as she was backpacking in Australia.
It only had my name and "Finland" as the address.
The card came with a special sticker "This item passed through the post office special mail resolution."
Sounds like someone had a boring day in a work in the post.
This works in the Netherlands too, and people commonly use the format for writing the sender address on the back of the envelope.
Eg if you live on Braamstraat 11, 5614LK Eindhoven, you can write “5614LK 11” as the return-to-sender address and it’ll work. Post codes here are always \d{4}[A-Z]{2} so it’s obvious to anyone (incl the address scan computers) where the postcode ends and the house number starts.
If you mail internationally you can write “NL-5614LK 11” and it’ll also work.
I recently moved here and really like that website that need your address here often have just 2 fields
house ___ postcode ____
you fill them in and typically it shows you the street name as confirmation (or complains that the house doesnt exist in the post code. Zip+4 was supposed to work in the US for this but i dont think people liked remembering another 9 digit number
It is in fact guaranteed that house numbers are unique within a Dutch postcode. I'm not sure if that is the case in the UK.
It is the case in the UK (house numbers or names, houses don't have to have numbers)
In Ireland, each house / letterbox receives it's own postcode (eircode), 7 alphanumeric characters long: XXX XXXX. For example, the full address of the official residency of our President (Áras an Uachtaráin), could be written as D08E1W3.
As per a response to the top comment, it can also be written <picture of a little leprechaun>, assuming you get the good letter carrier.
https://www.her.ie/amp/lol/unbelievable-this-letter-made-it-...
In the US, you can check the address database directly to see what the minimum required elements are that resolve to your address [0]. This is what the USPS does when you mail something, they match to this database and then print a delivery barcode along the bottom of the letter.
Worth noting is that the delivery barcode is all that really matters. If you write 'return to sender' on an envelope and change nothing else, then throw it in the post box, you're going to get it sent right back to you. Always take a marker and block out that barcode and enough of your original address so that it gets forced to a human.
Ah that’s what I’ve been doing wrong. I have some junk mail to my address but not my name that I’ve put “not at this address” on but they’re on a never ending circular journey. I didn’t mark out the bar code. (Because I’m following the USPS directions exactly)
I always try to maximise postal information rather than minimise, to reduce chance of error, given in my case I have many opportunities for people to make mistakes, e.g.:
- I have someone with the same first name and same last name at the same house number on the adjacent street.
- There is another street with the same name in the same city (although it is a different postcode).
- There was someone with the same surname and first initial in another flat in my block.
On that last point, it has been a particular bone of contention that the Post Office insist on identical postal addresses in their Postcode Address File (PAF) for different flats which share the same letter box. I always specify my flat number where I can to ensure I am uniquely identified (which is important for identity documents, financial information, insurance etc.), but in systems which use the PAF with no manual override I can't, which has led to all sorts of issues over the years, e.g.
- Unable to transfer an ISA because my old and new details didn't match.
- Had a former neighbour successfully set up a postal redirect for all flats in the block not just their own, meaning all my post, including bills, bank statements, a renewed driving licence which I happened to apply for at the time, basically everything you'd need for comprehensive identity theft, was redirected to someone else for several months with no-one able to do anything about it.
Apparently the only (absurd) workaround to get a unique entry in the PAF would be to physically install another letterbox in the same door (leading to the same floor).
I once sent a parcel to a friend and put “England, UK. Earth. Solar System. (Etc)” at the end of the address and it arrived at his house with “don’t take the piss” scribbled on it in red marker.
In Canada, kids can write letters to:
Santa
H0H0H0
which is valid postal code, and used to be processed by volunteers around Christmas time.
I suspect you can just write H0H0H0 and it will work.
Same in France/Belgium, kids can write a letter to "Santa" (i.e. "Père Noël" or "Papa Noël"), no need for a postcode, or anything else than the name :-)
(it is also processed [my guess would be by volunteers too] and kids receive a proper answer letter back from "Santa, North Pole")
At risk of sounding like a sourpuss, I can't help but think that this is something that most people who live in the UK work out simply by using web forms which autocomplete your address based on simply postcode and number.
And that reasoning of writing the form to just be postcode and flat number is why I can't get my address into forms.
There are two flat 1s in my postcode.
One place that would not work was the local council and so I could not get anything done, it took over a year of phoning up for this to be fixed. (of course the council tax database got it correct)
I wish companies would fix their addressing. My address has the form:
1 Example Close Somewhere Drive
But often when entering your postcode and selecting a house number, the address ends up as "1 Somewhere Drive" - which is a different place. The forms don't seem to realise that some locations should have multiple address lines. Fortunately in the UK, the postcode helps ensure our mail (mostly) arrives.
I've always assumed it but this guy actually tested it out, and so he gets credit for that
In Ireland you can just describe the person instead of the actual address and it'll get delivered
https://twitter.com/weefeargal/status/1479069076144234497?s=...
While this was in Ireland, it's worth specifying that Royal Mail was responsible for this wholesome delivery as it was in Northern Ireland (currently in the UK), so it's not immediately obvious that this applies to the Republic as well.
Incidentally the Republic of Ireland didn't have a nationwide postcode system until 2015.
Prior to that I used to address letters to a relative there as Name, Village, County and they were delivered! Turned out there were two people of the same name in the village but the postie saw the UK-originating stamp on the letter and ,delivered to the applicable one.
Intriguingly, the Irish Eircode system is seemingly not used for postal deliveries by An Post (the mail service).
See various contributions to the discussion here: https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058233089/is-it-true-that-...
Around the same time as the Eircode was introduced, water meters were installed for every property in Ireland. They have never been used, because of public outcry over the idea of being charged for water use. Don't imitate Ireland.
An Post is one of the intended users of the EirCode system. I'm tempted to try a letter or postcard to the eircode, just to see if it gets delivered.
e.g.
Ireland also makes it reasonably common that you won't have a number in the address.Name Eircode
Is a perfectly reasonable and somewhat common address.Someone Foo House Town Co Meath IrelandIt's actually quite amazing that Ireland survived without postcodes for so long.
The following format is probably the most common:
Townlands could have 200+ people. Maybe more in some areas.Name Townland Co. County IrelandOh definitely, my townland is at least a couple of estates, at 100+ houses each.
And then there are the creatively named estates, where the whole street name is stop words. One near me has "[number] The Avenue", "The Court", "The Close", "The Drive".
Townlands are optional, or it can be the name of a large road near you. I think there are at least 3 addresses corresponding to my house that are used by official government mail, one of the things that EirCodes were supposed to prevent.
True, heres a larger collection of North and South Postage
https://www.irishmirror.ie/sport/rugby-union/times-bizarre-i...
In Ireland any six digit eircode is unique to your address. You only have to put that on the envelope and it'll get delivered.
Eircode length is seven.
And as already mentioned - it's used by some automated sorting (I believe) but last mile delivery doesn't use it (aiui).
semi related - Address as a hand drawn maps:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-31/with-no-a...
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/postman-manages-del...
Also, Russian post successfully deciphering and delivering a mojibaked address: https://twitter.com/notrevenant/status/993170640625598470
Reminds me of this wonderful post, primarily UK oriented. Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...
I'll add one: An address with an apartment letter may not be the same building as the same address without the apartment letter. My address is something like "Bijvorbeeldstraat 3B". Next door, in a separate building, is "Bijvoorbeeld 3". Most services (including the national population register!) insist that I enter my address as "Bijvoorbeeldstraat 3 bus B", which results in (for everybody except the national post) coming to "Bijvoorbeeldstraat 3" and my deliveries getting marked as "nobody home".
In particular, I'm looking at you Uber Eats/Deliveroo. I get whinged at by roughly half the delivery drivers who come to deliver my food for putting in the wrong address, despite having delivery instructions that include a description of the correct door.
It’s interesting to see that the senders of these letters and postcards have not written Gandhi’s postal address. Since Gandhi was always travelling and campaigning all over the country; often people did not know his exact postal address and many letters were addressed to "Gandhiji, jahan ho wahan (meaning wherever he is)". [0]
[0] https://zikredilli.com/delhi-depository/f/to-gandhi-wherever...
There was a guy a few years ago who wrote addresses as puzzles and they got delivered: https://metro.co.uk/2014/07/17/prankster-writes-puzzles-inst...
The difference between different countries postal services is quite amusing. UK postmen delivering based on drawing on envelopes, while here in Czech Republic I have had mail not be delivered despite the address being printed on the envelope perfectly.
In Japan, most addresses can be fully identified without any street or city names, not unlike what's described in this article.
As an example, this is an address I found using Google Maps:
〒223-0007 1-14-12
If you have an apartment number, you can append it with another -, e.g. 1-14-12-201.
Written "properly", you would not use dashes, but instead suffix each number with a kanji (except for the post code).
Written properly, it would be:
〒233-0007 神奈川県横浜市港南区大久保１丁目１４番１２号、２０１号室
The place on Google Maps: https://goo.gl/maps/bDSFp1U1PNtBpUad6
More information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-35174646
"ENGLAND" seems sufficient!
> The card, it is believed, may have originally been addressed correctly and so was sent to the right area of England - but with an address label that fell off at some point.
That's a multi-stage letter, not fair!
In the US I wonder if something like "6 W 8, NY NY" would work. Google Maps can find it: https://www.google.com/maps/place/6+W+8th+St,+New+York,+NY+1...
Yeah that's totally unambiguous for NYC, so I'm sure it would. I imagine they'd really prefer if you also included the ZIP.
An annoyance in NYC is people not in Manhattan giving their address as NY, NY. A lot of street names repeat in other boroughs so you do in fact need to specify that that address is in Brooklyn if it's there. Queens is even more complicated since street names are not unique within the borough so you should use the "town"/municipality name (e.g. Ridgewood, Astoria, Long Island City (of which Astoria is a part so you can kinda use that for Astoria without problems in my experience)) when mailing there, not Queens.
A ZIP code (even just the 5-digit one) should disambiguate all of that though, right?
Yeah the city and state can be left off without any loss in precision if you include a ZIP. NYC has tiny ZIP code areas. Famously a few big buildings have their own, such as the Empire State Building (10018). Here's a list:
https://convene.com/catalyst/office/buildings-new-york-city-...
If you write to the DVLA (driver and vehicle licensing agency) they have various individual postcodes for different departments Eg SA99 1AR is vehicle customer services The whole of SA99 I'd dedicated to the DVLA, so simply SA99 on an envelope would probably get there, although written just DVLA would probably do that same.
Tangentially related, but I'm ordering a vehicle logbook from the DVLA at the moment. I'm a millennial/Gen-Z straddler, so it's been a real blast from the past-I-never-had.
I need to pay for my tax online. In order to do that, I need a number which is found in my logbook (V5C), which I've lost.
Can I do that online? Nope. To order a new log book, I need to fill out a V62 form and post it to the DVLA, along with a cheque for payment. That process takes 4-6 weeks. They don't accept cash. I don't own a cheque book. Guess I'll order one.
Can I do that online? No. I can't even get a cheque book from my normal bank, Monzo, as they deem them obsolete. I need to book an appointment with my old bank to pick one up.
Can I do that online? Of course not. I need to call them and find a spot. They don't have an appointment slot for the next couple of weeks.
The UK Government's website is normally wonderful. The fact I can't just pay for and order a new logbook online, or better yet, have a digital logbook so I never have to go through this pain in the first place, baffles me a little. I guess I'm not driving anywhere for the next few months. Suppose I'll be getting the train. Guess who's striking at the moment?
My local Credit Union will issue paper cheques on request (not a checkbook: they type up the cheque for you, addressed to whomever you request). But that's an independent Credit Union in Ireland. Still, it may be worth asking.
I have lost a V5C before.
You can actually order a 'duplicate' logbook with just the vehicle registration number, VIN and registered keeper address: https://www.gov.uk/vehicle-log-book
You can pay by credit/debit card.
Unfortunately, not if any information has change at all. In my case, a change of address. In that case, postage is the only option.
I wonder if you are within 6 months of your house move? If so a redirection of mail can be obtained.
You can order a new V5C online: https://www.gov.uk/vehicle-log-book
For future reference, you can pay with a Postal Order, which you can get over the counter from any Post Office.
I can't remember what it was, but my mum used postal orders a few times to protect her privacy. Unlike cheques, they don't have your name.
I've heard that you can write a cheque yourself on a piece of paper. I coudnt find much online about it except for this https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-20.... Id go with a postal order to be safe, but could be fun to try a DIY cheque!
You can put just ‘HMRC’ (UK tax department) on a letter (with paid postage) and it will get to them.
...and, if you write to a member of parliament at the Houses of Parliament, you don't have to use a stamp.
So presumably...
<MP name>
HP
...with no stamp on the envelope could theoretically work.
Now, which MP has the shortest name?
Can we go shorter? The Director General of MI6 traditionally has the designator 'C'. This probably wouldn't work anywhere in the UK, but if you dropped it off at a Post Office near Vauxhall Cross, they'd probably figure out what you meant.
Ed Davey, Tom Hunt, Rupa Huq, Ben Lake, Ian Levy, Alan Mak, Lia Nici, Naz Shah.
I daresay "A Mak" or "R Huq" would work too.
Since not including a stamp should imply it's for an MP maybe it would be enough to choose a unique short name. I think there's more than one Ed, but Lia or Naz should be sufficient.
Actually, thinking about it "PM" should be sufficent to address it to the Prime Minister. So...
PM
HP
Might work. Maybe I should go and parcel up some dogshit and try it.
Do you have a source for that? I could only find this, which seems to say the opposite: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/218301/response/54314...
No stamp required is due to “Franking privileges”. Same as in Canada.
US Congress people also have “franking privileges” but it only applies to outbound, not inbound mail.
There are also freepost addresses, where you can write "Freepost CompanyName" with no postage. I've found one on google which is just "Freepost OAL".
I believe DVLC would work too (now DVLA, iirc).
"Now" was 33 years ago!
Definitely not unique to Japan, but several towers here have their own zip code, and there is at least one building I know where the building has several zip codes (each for various floors of the building).
People take this and extrapolate to think that we should just be writing very long zip codes for everything, but the wonderful nature of writing out addresses is that they have a lot of possible error correcting. The one thing that is still pretty haphazard is the street number, let's get some ECC checks in there!
A building in the UK with about 300 apartments will prob have around 8 postal codes
I've been in at least two apartments blocks that had multiple post codes, but that's not hugely unusual as a UK post code is (to a first approximation[0]) a street identifier, so the high street has one, the side street has another, and the rear parking might also be its own.
In one case, this meant my front door and back door had different post codes, even though it was a 35 square metre one bed apartment.
[0] except when it isn't https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcodes_in_the_United_Kingdo...
A friend of mine dropped out of university and went to live the "ski-bum" lifestyle in France. His mum wasn't happy with this and eventually took to writing letters to him addressed "Joe and his stupid friends, Chamonix". They all arrived without issues.
This was in the early 90's. I wonder how effective this would be now with more automated systems in use.
I have a friend in Chamonix I could try this with!
In the US, there are a number of buildings with their own zip code, but you can do a little better. The president has 20500-0001 reserved, but even he loses out to someone more important: Smokey the bear is the only resident of 20252 =).
https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2014/07/01/letters-smokey-be...
Now I want to send him a postcard to just the ZIP and see if it makes it!
Reminds me that https://what3words.com/ exists, it's too bad a system like this couldn't be implemented globally. I'd love to write ///rich.soup.noble on an envelope and have it delivered
this was my first thought reading the comments
well at least there is some recent activity https://nitter.net/what3words
It looks like it went through the automated letter sorter, too (see the orange barcode that's been added to the envelope). Not surprising as the address is even more unambiguous to a machine than a human.
Occasionally there are viral stories here of letters being addressed to places like "The blue house, Termonfeckin, Ireland", which looks like it conveys less information even if it's physically longer. These get manually sorted, though.
That orange barcode could've been added by a human too. The entire sorting process only relies on that barcode, so once a human decodes the address and adds that barcode it'll just work.
> It looks like it went through the automated letter sorter, too
I understand the mail sorting depots can x-ray scan and read the contents of letters up to 4 pages of a4 folded, but that could have been hackers feeding me fake info in order to stop me writing letters.
An example of the technique https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/02/researchers-re...
I'm not aware of any postal service that uses a method other then optical imaging for address reading. Further, in some countries such as the US, it is not legal for the postal service to "look inside" mail pieces without a warrant.
While this type of 3D X-Ray technique is indeed possible it requires expensive specialized equipment and a great deal of effort, thus it being a major achievement for this university group. Or in other words, if a research group puts out a press release lauding a first, it is not likely to be a technology in use in thousands of sorting centers for millions of mail pieces daily.
The Royal Mail in the UK is definitely allowed to open mail as a last resort to figure out where it should be returned to, the National Returns Centre undertakes this work. If the contents turn out to be something that isn't returned (e.g. a newspaper or magazine) it's destroyed, if it's a letter the NRC will try to figure out where it came from and send it back there.
Most commercial mail carries an return address written on the reverse to avoid the need for this, and of course letters you write by hand should also provide a return address in principle although you're much less likely to send stuff to the wrong address than a commercial operation - when I heard my cousin had moved just before Xmas I didn't send her a card, because there's no point sending it to the wrong place and hoping it gets forwarded eventually, it's just an Xmas card.
> I'm not aware of any postal service that uses a method other then optical imaging for address reading. Further, in some countries such as the US, it is not legal for the postal service to "look inside" mail pieces without a warrant.
It could be hackers exploiting my lack of knowledge to social engineer me for their own criminal gain then. They even mentioned some of the old postal machines were for sale on ebay.co.uk, so when I looked there were 2nd hand postal xray machines for sale.
X-ray is not that unusual to check for contraband at customs, although it depends on the country whether or not it is a routine practice or requires suspicion. Perhaps the UK does so on domestic mail as well but that would be surprising to me, it's pretty high cost to do at large volume. These X-ray machines are the same type used at airports and usually produce either a synthetic isometric 3D-type image or two 2D images at 90 degree offset. The resolution and sensitivity are both nowhere near high enough to read text on documents, they're primarily oriented at recognizing firearms and very dense objects typical of drug smuggling. Much of the data modern X-ray parcel scanners produce is synthetic as well, based on machine vision and multi-exposure methods, so the display tends to suggest that the data they collect is of higher resolution than it actually is.
You would struggle to determine whether a page is folded A4 or A8 with one of these machines, reading text is far beyond their capabilities.
There's a difference between spotting a bomb in a parcel and reading the instruction manual.
The conversations I saw claimed they could read the ink on upto 4 sheets of A4 folded in an envelope. It may have been a form of social engineering, because I'm aware state hackers ignore laws and invade peoples privacy and enter their homes through the resident's internet connections.
(note: this may no longer be true - I learned this in the late 90s, and my recollection is slightly fuzzy, so take the details with a pinch of salt).
Royal Mail postcodes that people commonly use may be augmented with a so-called Delivery Point Suffix (DPS), that is an extension of the postcode that identifies a unique delivery address.
The DPS is an alphanumeric code like "1A". As such it is likely shorter than the decimal property number, and does not waste characters on things like "flat 2".
I think a postcode plus DPS should be sufficient to get a letter to a specific address.
High volume bulk mailers can qualify for discounts if they use the DPS, and apply sorting to bag up mail based on destination sorting office and the like.
Sometimes you can see the DPS printed after the postcode on your bills if you get mail from a company that has huge mail volumes.
I learned all this when I re-wrote a god-awful bulk mail sorting program called qamsort (Quick Address Mailsort) for a mobile Telco billing department. Back then Royal Mail used to give away the data needed to do the sorting. Took me a week of lunchtimes, written in Perl, ran in a fraction of the time of qamsort, and didn't cause monthly callouts at 2a.m. because of bullshit license key file expiry.
Never got used in production because people were too change averse and my boss didn't think we could sell it for enough to be worth taking on the risk, which turned out to be the right decision because Royal Mail started charging a pretty penny for access to the sorting data not long thereafter.
I was very excited to learn Perl back then. Fun times.
My dad talks about how durring the Vietnam War his friend who was kind of slow got drafted and would send him letters addressed to "Dennis by the swap in Eden Prairie" and they'd somehow actually get delivered.
He should have written
20
SE1 6AD
GB
Already on it! :)
I suppose it depends on the country you post from, but I'd expect "UK" to be more universally understood than "GB".
In fact, in some European countries it was until recently general usage to prefix a postcode with the country abbreviation for cars,[0] i.e., A for Austria, B for Belgium, D for Germany, FIN for Finland, H for Hungary, NL for the Netherlands, SLO for Slovenia, etc. But I guess the ISO country codes are now at least as well recognized and will also work.
[0] http://www.columbia.edu/~fdc/postal/#europe "After World War II and up until the mid-1990s, all European postcodes included country-code prefixes. These were originally United Nations "car codes" (one, two, or three letters), kept in an annex, "Car (Or Road) Distinguishing Signs", to the 1949/68 United Nations Conventions on Road Traffic, adopted in part by the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT). These codes were not accepted by the Universal Postal Union as a world standard, but were widely used anyway."
UK is also more correct because it includes Northern Ireland and the other smaller islands (which are not in Great Britain, the main island)
Although interestingly, Northern Ireland and the Channel Islands have the ISO country code GB, but Gibraltar (GI), the Isle of Man (IM), the Falklands (FK), and many others do not. Some are Crown Dependencies, which I suppose is understandable, but others are part of the UK.
Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands (among a few other places) aren't crown dependencies or part of the UK, they're the vestigial remnants of the British Empire that rejected full independence for various reasons. Until around the time of the Falklands War they were still called crown colonies but they're now called British Overseas Territories. They're not like France's equivalent where many are integral parts of France.
Even then, the Channel Island are a Crown Dependency and use the GB ISO code, while the Isle of Man is also a Crown Dependency and has its own ISO code.
The British Indian Ocean Territory and the British Antarctic Territory are both British Overseas Territories, but unlike the Falklands, Bermuda, etc, do not have their own ISO codes.
So the determination is more complex than that.
These have codes GG, JE, IO.
Claims of Antarctic territory aren't recognised internationally, so the codes were removed, but it used to have the code BQ.
There's a CCP Grey video which take a decent stab at untangling everything:
It's only more correct if the address is in Northern Ireland or one of the other islands that make up the UK but not Great Britain - which London is definitely not.
GB is the correct ISO country code for Great Britain.
I would not be confident in postal systems routing letters based on ISO country codes. If you send your letter in Tennessee with AR at the bottom of it, it's going to Arkansas or nowhere, not Argentina.
Yes, there are actually standard postal country names assigned jointly by the country concerned and UPU (the organisation that manages how mail works globally). For example, the correct country name for ISO GB is "UNITED KINGDOM" (https://www.upu.int/UPU/media/upu/PostalEntitiesFiles/addres...)
Pedantic: actually, there are (up to) two valid postal country names: the English one (UNITED KINGDOM) and the French one (ROYAUME-UNI, https://www.upu.int/UPU/media/upu/PostalEntitiesFiles/addres...). This is due to historical reasons: (jointly) Britain and the US (which use English) were the most advanced in postal services but the diplomatic language at the time is French.
That always trips a lot of people up because .uk is the country-code top-level domain for Great Britain, and cctlds are assigned using the 2-letter ISO country code for that country.
...except for Great Britain, who were one of the first few other countries to be connected to the internet, and decided to use .uk before people realised that every country would need one, and using already-assigned ISO codes would be the best way to hand them out.
Partially this is because the Joint Academic NETwork (JANET) in the uk used addresses in the form of xyz@uk.ac.qmc.cs according to wikipedia the JANET NRS had uk as the top level prior to dns adopting ISO codes in 1984 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET_NRS
Huh? The country is called "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland", or the UK for short. Strictly speaking, if you talk about Great Britain, you're excluding Northern Ireland, but politically GB isn't a country...
Wikipedia says "Great Britain is an island in the North Atlantic Ocean", although historically there was also the Kingdom of Great Britain.
Letters like K for kingdom are generally avoided in codes, since this way a change of constitution to the Republic of Great Britain and Northern Ireland doesn't require a new code.
Well, go complain to ISO then, not me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_3166_country_codes...
Edit: Also, if you've ever seen UK teams compete in international sports, all their athletes have "GBR" on their team uniforms.
Yeah, GP is shooting the messenger. If the GP is reading this, here is the address of the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency:
ISO 3166-1:2020: Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions — Part 1: Country code ISO 3166-2:2020: Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions — Part 2: Country subdivision code ISO 3166-3:2020: Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions — Part 3: Code for formerly used names of countries Maintenance Agency ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency c/o ISO Central Secretariat BIBC II Chemin de Blandonnet 8 1214 Vernier Switzerland Tel: +41 22 749 01 11 E-mail: customerservice@iso.org Website: www.iso.org/mara/iso3166
GB is the correct ISO country code for Great Britain
But is the mail in the source country sorted by people, computers programmed by people, or by the ISO committee?
But eph is right. All addresses in "Norn Iron" have a UK postcode, beginning BT [for Belfast]. So while a letter addressed to...
Someone
BTXX XXX
GB
...would probably get there, it would technically be incorrect. Mind you...
Someone
BTXX XXX
UK
...might not get there either, if your postie was a dyed-in-the-wool republican!
Funny, since Great Britain is not a country.
It would be one char more minimal if he moves from "SE1" to e.g. the "N1" area.
I wonder if there are performance differences/overheads between the address styles?
Maybe automated sorting machines use redundant information for OCR error-correction, and omitting it might kick the letter into a fallback "manual processing" queue as the automation has no way of checking the validity of its guess?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxCha4Kez9c might be of interest - it has some of what the machines are trying to read and what accuracy they need.
Living in Spain I really learned to appreciate a well-working postal service which is ultimately a small, but meaningful factor in quality of life. That said, the postal services are generally pretty good in Spain, but there's a big problem of addresses, and the very outdated databases that were true at one point, but someone since re-named the street two-three times already (or just made up a street name to get some process going, like to connect the electricity when the final street name wasn't given yet). Lots of houses have one official address (on the deed), one (or three) address that everyone knows it by. The street signs and even the house numbers are wrong sometimes. Our house currently has no less than five addresses, used with various providers.
It's very important to have the base/grounds/fundamentals in a good way to support things building on top. If you have shitty network your application will be shitty, too. If you have bad roads you can't have a fast and reliable shipping of goods between companies. You have to invest in the base to have an enviornment which allow to grow and evolve.
In Germany there was a lot of discussion about fiber Internet build out and if we need it. At some point the discussion changed to "Yes, we need it as the base" and only discussion about you pays for it.
For me personally I feel more comfortable and safe with a working base (aka Goverment/Community/Society). And a lot of people working hard to have the base up and running to just let some egiost running their company and proudly saying "It's me who worked hard to build this great company and I'm the greatest man on earth". But of course he could only do that with the base.
Loved your article!
>> I wrote myself a letter, headed to the nearest postbox, and posted it. >> A couple of days later, I was very happy to find this in my postbox!
To make this more robust, i'd try this exercise 10-20 times. Different dates (to test for driver). Different sources (to test for source PO)
It's not necessary, in the almost 10y I was at my previous address I only used (other than the odd web form with mandatory 'address line 2' or whatever) flat number & postcode. It's not a weird niche blogging exercise, it's just how it works.
It's usual to be a bit more redundant on the front of an envelope/parcel for whatever reason, but the normal form for a return address is '12/AB3 4CD'. There's nothing magic about returning post that makes a shorter address start working! (It would have a postmark additionally by then, but that's not extra information - the postcode is already more specific, being on just one of that office's many routes).
I'm pretty sure this will work 95% of the time or more.
Most mail is sorted automatically in the UK, and I think the automatic sort machines would understand this (they look for a postcode, and can understand handwriting).
I wonder if the author posted the letter from a local post box. It could be that locality improves the chances of it reaching its desired address. E.g I wonder what happens if the letter was posted from a more remote location in the UK.
Any post office anywhere in the UK would see the "SE" and know the letter should be sent to London, however that happens.
Most people who live in Britain recognise the first part of postcodes for large cities and neighbouring areas. I'm sure post workers know all of them, they're mostly mnemonic.
Kids in gangs use postcodes to define their territory, they're that easy to use.
The small format is also seen on the back of many business letters as a return address.
Postcodes in Poland are much less granular than the UK ones, but you can still get by in more rural areas on the assumption of local postmen knowing the people. My parents used to routinely successfully receive letters addressed just
<my parents’ names> <town name>
where the town has circa 3K inhabitants.
Many people don't realize that in the USA, the letters only get sorted by postal zip code (and sometimes zip+4) - everything else is sorted by the postman as he walks the streets, so if your letter gets to the right post office it will likely get to the right postman and he can often figure it out without it even having to go to the dead letter office.
Most (all?) P.O. Boxes in the US have unique zip+4 addresses so you should, in theory, be able to send a letter to:
12345-6789
(assuming that actually corresponded to a P.O. Box) and have it delivered.
With automation, you might even be able to just put the bar code for a letter on the envelope and have it delivered. I say this based on the fact that I used to stamp mail for previous inhabitants with a not at this address and black out the address (but not the bar code), dump it in the mailbox and then have it show up in the email I get daily from the post office showing the day’s mail (fortunately, the human step of delivery usually pulled those letters out of the process).
In Ireland it's just XXX XXXX (each property gets assigned with a unique EirCode)
And in Dublin, the first three exactly match the city area (e.g. D01 for Dublin 1) -- though outside the city the first three become less obvious.
Just the same, it's incredibly annoying that ecommerce sites still generally require full addresses rather than just using the An Post Eircode lookup thing to map an entered Eircode to an address.
The UK also has UPRNs (Unique Property Reference Numbers),[0] although they've only recently become a publicly-licensed dataset
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_Property_Reference_Numb...
Although An Post don't use EirCodes, so I wonder if an EirCode alone is enough?
Source: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/an-post-staff-fail-to-use...
Interesting large delivery companies do not use EirCode either. It was not primarily designed for deliveries but taxation. It's still annoys me to this day.
The Irish government had a problem administering Property tax and the TV Licence due to data sharing restrictions between departments. Unique Eircodes per property was the solution. This was explicitly stated by the Communications Minister Pat Rabbitte at the time of launch. The proposed Broadcasting Charge to replace TV licenses was not rolled out due to public opposition but EirCodes remain. Due to their random nature they are also less useful to emergency services.
Delivery companies have taken courtcases against the government over the EirCode rollout and there is an ongoing courtcase over allegations of corruption relating to the awarding of the EirCode contract[1].
[1] https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2022/11/28/firm-claims-c...
> Due to their random nature they are also less useful to emergency services.
That's not my experience at all. They've been a revolution in address resolution at NEOC in my experience, and they're used for navigation on nearly every emergency call.
If I write just an EirCode on an envelope the letter would be delivered anyways.
Are you sure? It might be a case of someone in the system Googling the address and writing it in.
I've tried to do that several times, it always worked. I don't know why/how but it works.
Back in the 80s/90s I recall my parents getting carried away with a fad of marking valuable personal objects with house number and postcode (in the same fashion as in this post) so they could be identified if stolen. Apparently it's still a thing – https://www.immobilise.com/ – but I haven't personally heard about anyone doing it in decades.
In my building, mail for all flats gets delivered to the same postbox, so we don’t need the flat part.
You do if you don't want one of the other residents taking and opening it instead..(!) ;-)
The little tags you can put on your keychain for your grocery store rewards card often have a "postage guaranteed" line on them, if someone finds your keys I guess they can throw them in a mailbox and it'll get back to the grocery store and then they can forward them on to you.
I've never tried it personally.
I remember my parents doing this too, I think there may have been some national campaign or promotion at the time to get the marking pens for free.
This reminds me of the Derek & Clive sketch where a letter of complaint is addressed to the Director General of the BBC:
C**, London
Apsley House famously has (or had?) the address "Number 1, London".
My parents told me this every time we went past it when I was growing up.
https://londonist.com/2016/06/why-does-apsley-house-have-the...
It looks from Wikipedia that that's a popular name rather than official one.
The house was given the popular nickname of Number One, London, since it was the first house passed by visitors who travelled from the countryside after the toll gates at Knightsbridge.[3] It was originally part of a contiguous line of great houses on Piccadilly, demolished to widen Park Lane: its official address remains 149 Piccadilly, W1J 7NT.[4]
However, if you posted a letter it would probably get there if the Post Office were determined enough.
I am now that parent
I grew up in a small town with a population of about 2,000. I remember one time I signed up for a website with my real name and city, but didn't want to give my home address so just made up "123 Main St" (my town doesn't have a "Main St"). Sure enough, they sent a spam postcard, addressed to my name @ 123 Main St. The post office, being friendly and knowing who all the residents are, still delivered it to my home, alas...
In the UK we have postcodes. These have the same function as a US zip code.
However, they can appear a bit random here and have a resolution of about three or four properties.
>In the UK we have postcodes. These have the same function as a US zip code.
The USPS wanted everyone to know about zip codes and provided a musical tutorial[0] as to why zip codes were a good idea...
I once got USPS mail addressed to:
My name My town (slightly misspelled), My State
no zip code, no mail box number. The beauty of being in a small town where the postmaster knows who you are.
I think he implied it but there are postal codes that refer to a single Mail Drop location.
For example, sometimes your tax return will have its own zip code in the USA.
Any mail addressed to members of ships' crews on vessels transiting the Detroit River can be delivered to them via J. W. Westcott II by being addressed "Vessel Name, Marine Post Office, Detroit, Michigan, 48222." (wikipedia)
At my university there were postcodes per large building
Technically, an occupant of flat 1 could have rationally concluded that it was addressed to them as much as it was to anyone else in the building.
Years ago I was told that in Canada house number + postal code was sufficiently unique to deliver mail. This made sense to me in a design, it drastically cuts the amount of information that needs to be read off the envelope.
Then I bought a house that shares a postal code and number with a house on the street behind.
It’s had me wondering what the minimum viable address for any address in the country would be.
I had a friend who was a farmer in a rural part of Britain and you could send him a letter by just writing First Name, Last Name, County and he would get the letter as his family had been farming that land for hundreds of years and the postal service could figure it out somehow.
I also remember an art project where they put the address in the form of various different kinds of puzzles and had letters successfully delivered.
I think there's some kind of ancient law that the postal service has to try everything possible to find out how to deliver a letter. I suspect that there is a legal aspect to this as well because I was told once that if you send someone a legal notice in Britain by Royal Mail, saying, e.g. 'You have 28 days to comply blah blah' the key date is the date it was posted, not the date it was received, unless the recipient can prove they received it late, not sure if that is still true since the post office was privatised.
> ... because I was told once that if you send someone a legal notice in Britain by Royal Mail, saying, e.g. 'You have 28 days to comply blah blah' the key date is the date it was posted, not the date it was received, unless the recipient can prove they received it late, not sure if that is still true since the post office was privatised.
It is. The Interpretation Act 1978 section 7 is where this bit of law currently resides but the principle is older than that:
Where an Act authorises or requires any document to be served by post (whether the expression “serve” or the expression “give” or “send” or any other expression is used) then, unless the contrary intention appears, the service is deemed to be effected by properly addressing, pre-paying and posting a letter containing the document and, unless the contrary is proved, to have been effected at the time at which the letter would be delivered in the ordinary course of post.
Many people don't realize that the mail/postal service existed for way longer than Zip Codes™ and such things, and addresses were much closer to "bob jones, last farm after the river, slopshire" than anything defined and regulated.
This is the case in France, the official date is the one on the stamp, not the one of the reception day.
This is called "cachet de la Poste faisant foi"
In terms of buildings/mail unit, an example of a post code in the UK would be CB2 1TQ which is for Trinity College.
I wonder what is the shortest adress that works in Germany. Central Mannheim has streets (or rather squares) which are identified by a combination of a single letter and a single digit. This is then followed by the number of the house. But sometimes a building occupies a whole square. So for example
E5
68159 Mannheim
One should get away with using the number plate abbriviation "MA" for "Mannheim". So something like
H5
68159 MA
H5
68159
And perhaps even
H5
MA
H5
Another possibility for short addresses is that some companies or agencies in Germany have their own postal code. So just writing their five-digit-code on the envelope should suffice.
I once ordered something and wrongly selected the country next to mine on a drop down "Uganda" rather than "United Kingdom". The letter was sent from the UK, and eventually arrived to me ~2 months late stamped with "miss-routed to Uganda".
Yes, this is one thing I love about the UK compared to NZ.
My first postcode here pointed right to the apartment building I was in, so it was essentially: 9, WXXXX.
Now my postcode points to the group of flat buildings I'm in and is now 8, NXXXXX.
Obviously things get a tiny bit looser as you leave less populated/central areas but it's still a really neat system, but as per usual it's corrupted by UK's history, things being added in etc and it's not based on any sort of co-ordinates beyond compass/regions.
Would be amazing to see a grid based co-ordinate system that could be adopted as an international standard over time. Then again it does lose the character of the full address/street name (which is something important to people from the UK).
If you enjoyed this, you might also enjoy this: https://www.meversusanpost.com/
Somebody who does this for fun, normally with some kind of puzzle that needs solving to get the address.
Does anyone remember in old-timey puzzle books that you might have read as a kid, the example puzzles (maybe fictional) of how the British postal service would decode people's addresses expressed in rebus form?
Like:
HILL
----
MIKE
----
WOOD
They would say the post office cleverly got it delivered to Mike Underhill, Overwood UK.
I guess that was for a more leisurely, less efficient time.
I've heard this story with "MASS" and being delivered in Massachusetts.
Ah yes that's probably it. I'm just remembering it vaguely.
Interesting, I tried something similar here in the US by using an address like this:
1 my street
01234-5678
But the letter was returned to me as "Address Unknown". It needed the City and State to be delivered. Nice to see in the UK the postal codes are more useful then here in the US.
This can be hit or miss, I remember when younger I got a letter to our PO Box with just the ZIP+4 (the ZIP is unique for a post office, and if there are less than 10000 PO Boxes, the +4 is unique for the box).
Part of it can come down to if the postman wants to bother to figure it out.
Think of it as a checksum, not an IP address.
> unlike countries where a postcode represents an entire neighbourhood
¿Porqué no los dos? The largest cities in Poland have thousands of postcodes, some of them have ~one street per postcode (or sometimes a smaller part of it), so many postcodes have less than a thousand distinct mailboxes, and you can probably find postcodes assigned to a single building (that were not paid for or granted to a specific institution). And then you get to cities with around 200k inhabitants* and there is one postcode that covers the entire city, plus a few nearby villages.
* Toruń. (This previously said 120k and Gorzów Wielkopolski, but I found a larger city.)
You can also register aliases somehow.
If you need to send something (cheques etc) to Monzo bank I'm pretty sure you can just write "Monzo" on the envelope. No stamp needed.
Pretty sure = it worked like 6 years ago when I last encountered a cheque.
I can't claim to be this clever, but I do remember a friend telling me at least two decades ago that all he gives the taxi is the postcode + house number.
Seems this is also not some special knowledge as all of his friends did the same.
Once lived in a Canadian house that had its own postal code.
Was always careful with any system that showed you the closest stores or whatever by postal code.
I think I only tried to send one envelope with just the postal code and it didn’t make it!
Did sites proposed to show you a list of hot singles in your postal code?
this would produce all sorts of issues with logistics algorithms. e commerce delivery for example
Quite a few online forms do this already, you only need to put in the postcode then you are presented with a selection of house numbers.
Often we put the house number and postcode on the back of the envelope as a sender address.
In the Netherlands you can do something similar. Postal code + house number is unique for a box (there can be no multiple boxes at a single house number), and all other info is optional.
So, a full address could be: 1540 AB 1.
Royal Mail used to be (perhaps still are!) spectacularly good at delivering improperly addressed mail. I once got mail addressed to "house on the corner opposite the pub, <village name>".
Very entertaining post and comments. :)
Big old fashion corporation had sometime build up their on internal postal system. Sometimes the try to reinvent the wheel instead of just reading about the estiablished postal system and get the best out of it.
One time I worked in such a big corporation and I have written internal letters to the CEO during business trips to other locations with a big "Thank You Postal Office Operations Team" on the enevlope to increase their visibility.
I think this is commonly known due to address finders online for shopping etc. providing autofill based on these two items.
However, I would be more interested to understand how the address is used by the postman delivering the mail.
If you have just a post code, do they have to look up the street name (how?) or is it already pre-organised for them so they know that stack/bag X of letters all corresponds to street Y and so they only really need to look at the door number?
It’s a sorting of all the mail to the mail carrier level, so yes, they do only need to look at the door number. Similarly the ZIP+4 in the US will give down to some fraction of the mail carrier’s route, that they can then sort to a monotonically increasing delivery point number, that is where the carrier actually stops. A full barcode includes the delivery point, but it’s not usually included on the written address.
I live in London too, but I really don't think this would work well for most things, Royal Mail, sure. But if I give a this to a private parcel company, theres no way they are going to figure out that, despite being the only #9 in my postcode, there are 3 streets that my postcode covers, google maps doesn't locate my house specicically if I put "9 <postcode>', it will absolutely be marked as could not locate.
I suspect there are databases that will geolocate such an address.
There are and they cost upwards of £20,000 a year for a license. There’s a reason why smaller delivery companies get the address wrong and that is probably part of the issue.
The official one provided by Royal Mail is called the Postcode Address File (PAF) [0].
That doesn’t provide any geolocation information (unless it’s changed recently?), for that you need OS AddressBase
One such database is https://www.royalmail.com/find-a-postcode
A postcode and house number is all that's needed in theory in the UK, so something like `2 A12 1XY`. In reality that would be weird and people would add the street and town.
One issue also is that, even though the postcode pinpoints a small group of houses, it might happen to span two streets. It also gets complicated with flats and any number of other corner cases.
Addresses are complicated as anyone who has had to deal with them in code will testify.
You might want to read the (short) article ;)
Ha, fair challenge. OK, turns out I was right at least. :)
I remember something from a long time ago, very pre-Internet. Just checked and I found it easily enough. I would consider it apocryphal, but anyway, an address of
Wood,
John,
Hants.
John Underwood,
Andover,
Hants.
Edit: that and a few more, including (if true) and incredible address of just
C B N BNetherlands: each street has a unique postal code and number. So your unique address would be something like `2800AA 2`. Or `8440HK 14a`.
I was actually thinking about this recently and came to the same conclusion. Postcodes are normally for 1 street only, so the house number + postcode are the only things required. Normally when giving my address I give the road name too, just so online mapping services function properly. Typing "20 SE1 6AD" into google maps doesn't work.
As a conversation topic in our engineering team recently, we discussed what the shortest possible message you could send to pinpoint as specific a position on earth, unambiguously, in as few possible characters, in plain readable non-coded language.
Like "top of the great pyramid", for example, looks like it is a 200 sq ft area, in 25 characters of message.
0N0E, maybe (Null Island)? Depending on if latitude and longitude count as coded or not.
Otherwise "Burj tip" could be quite good (centimetres).
I don't think 0n0e would count- too coded.
But "Burj Tip" is great, it might have won the contest (judging involved lots of arguing)! Alas, we already ate the prize though, so you're out of luck.
K2 peak
Top K2
90°S
0,0
Ø in Denmark doesn't really compete, nor the many villages called Å in Norway.
For the opposite, the most area with the fewest letters, Io, Sun and Space.
"Rad Cam" gets you a ~800 square metre circle.
U-995 gets you an ovoid 67.10 metres by 6.20 metres.
"S Pole"?
Six characters for an exact point on Earth.
Possibly ambiguous by a few km, as it could be the geographic South Pole, the magnetic South Pole or even the geomagnetic South Pole.
The geographic South pole and the magnetic South pole are almost 3 thousand km apart:
In the US several federal institution have their own zipcodes, no box number required. So they might win the "shortest address" competition on this side of the pond.
For example: 20500 just goes straight to the Whitehouse, 20501 to the Vice President, 20511 to the Director of Intelligence, 20555 is the nuclear regulatory commission, etc.
Well it's all going to a central place in the flats, so without a specification on which flat how do we know which flat the letter belongs to - works well with a house you own but the minimalism could mean your post being inadvertently taken.
However it's a good show of how much ink/time is wasted normally on letters with useless data.
See also:
* https://twitter.com/weefeargal/status/1479069076144234497?s=...
* https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1342102/amp/How-Roy...
* https://www.irishpost.com/news/irish-postman-miraculously-de... (and the three other stories linked within!!)
* https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/67207/letter-no-address-...
* https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/postman-manages-del... (possibly my favourite)
Good old posties
Austria can top this, there are towns without street names, so the shortest address you could have for example would be (in this example the number is 0, to not post a real address here)
5222 Ach 0
(Which translates to the town of Ach in the ZIP code 5222, and house number 0)
If you write it like this it may be even an international valid address (for some countries)
A-5222 Ach 0
Britain is still smaller if we can choose an arbitrary address.
S1 1AA
There will be hundreds of complete addresses with this pattern, and many thousands if we add a house number before it.
This is the first I found that is valid. It's the central post office in Sheffield.
Is that a ZIP code that maps to one specific building, or is it really a valid post address, matching any valid speicification, rules and laws?
In Austria we also have Buildings that have a 4-digit ZIP code. But it's not a valid address, because a valid address needs a city, street and house number. "5222 Ach 0" has it all ;)
It is a post code for a specific building/business, and it is therefore also a valid address. It will work. However, it is not the recommended address, which is:
For large businesses to get discounted posting rates they must use the recommended address, presumably the redundancy makes for more reliable OCR and less effort for the postman at the point of delivery.Royal Mail Sheffield Delivery Office Pond Street Sheffield S1 1AAIt's fairly common to use the abbreviated addresses when handwriting a return address.
I know that many constituent colleges at the University of Cambridge are the only address in their post code. For example, Trinity College is CB2 1TQ.
However, hundreds of people live in each college (they just have large mailrooms), so on a practical level you’d likely need to put your name down if you wanted to get mail.
Something I always mean to try, is to put an address on a webserver and the URL on the envelope, and see if the "address detective" dept would dereference it.
I'm sure it would take longer as it would have to go via the exception case; but if enough people then did it they would have to automate it.
When I was a kid I had a classmate mail me a letter with only my name and postcode, i.e. going even further than OP, by omitting the house number.
The letter arrived a day or two later, and I brought it to school, to his surprise.
The trick? There are only 2 addresses with that postcode, and they're right next to each other.
One of Don Rosa's books has the letters he sent to a friend in college, each with a drawing on the envelope and less and less address, until finally it was all drawing and barely part of a name - they all got (eventually) delivered.
There's a specific branch of the post office that works on these - the dead letter office: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxCha4Kez9c
I was in Ecuador last spring and wanted to send a postcard back home to friends.
Long story short, you can buy postcards but there's no stamps. There's also no post offices because the national postal service went bankrupt a couple years ago.
I hear that maybe the national post office got revived in Aug 2022 though?
>I hear that maybe the national post office got revived in Aug 2022 though?
Apparently so! <https://gringopost.com/2023/02/17/postal-service-of-ecuador-...>
In the US, PO Boxes often have their own ZIP code. I used to be able to be reached from anywhere in the world by:
01004-0072 US
In Finland, you can send a letter to Santa Claus with only this address:
Joulupukki 99999 Korvatunturi
Postal code 99999 was reserved for this purpose.
But then the Post Office nearest that mountain would have to re-direct all those letters to the North Pole... where he actually lives!>and "Korvatunturi" is the mountain where he supposedly lives...That's some kind of American legend. Everybody in Finland knows he lives at Korvatunturi!
He also has a tourist trap at Rovaniemi (a city in Lapland) where the letters actually end up.
The USPS has used 88888 for this: https://about.usps.com/holidaynews/operation-santa.htm
Time for a Classic (could not find it on YouTube)
UK House Numbers:
https://www.facebook.com/BBCArchive/videos/1961-tonight-hous...
In the UK there are several single-line addresses that would probably work (10 Downing St, His Majesty the King, Blenheim Palace, Chatsworth) but they all use more characters than the example presented.
Could the number of characters be reduced?
SW1A 1AA is Buckingham Palace.
'HM' ?
Would a crown (U+1F451) count as a single character?
I wonder if writing down the unicode codepoint would work...
I wonder if printing a photo of the king or PM where the address should go would work.
(obviously a lot more bits than simply writing the address)
Someone has already pointed out that you can allegedly write simply HMRC and expect it to work, but I'd like to point out that there are enough single-use postcodes that presumably you can just write SW1A 1AA and it'll get to the King...
He's right in the general case (house numbers are guaranteed unique within postcodes, so that's the minimal set of information that makes something deliverable).
But he's wrong - "1 London" works as an address. It's Apsley House.
There's the old gag about a letter received by the Post Office that it managed to deliver (at least, in the story):
It just said:
Wood
John
Hants
It is like the world's youngest time capsule, only a couple of days old.
Aren't there enough named houses in the UK that you could just write something like "Buckingham Palace" or "Downton Abbey" and it would get there without further need of address?
In the US I believe zip code is not required? And if you're sending just within your town, maybe not the town/state? So would something like "125 Main" or "4 State" work?
or to get as short as possible "1 A" (for A Street)
If you expect the post office to manually guess the normalized address from the incomplete form, just a unique narrow area name and your name alone should suffice.
That is, if you have a name unique enough in that area.
I really like the uk post code system. Most website have auto complete. So address is type in 6 digits and select flat number from drop down.
I’ve even seen buildings where different floors have diff codes
And that is why I can't use some sites.
There are two number 1s in my postcode
My parents used to successfully get mail addressed to "Green House, [name of lake], New Hampshire"
And I would receive mail to "[lastname] [ZIP + 4]" (when I lived in New York City).
Makes me wonder if we shouldn't just assign each building a code.
It could be quite short: four letters and four digits would give you nearly half a billion possibilities.
That’s exactly how Irish post codes work and only use 7 chars: https://www.eircode.ie/
Although a check digit would have been worth it IMO
In the US we have ZIP (14817) and ZIP+4 (14817-9709), the latter is highly specific and will get you in the "few buildings" range almost always.
In the later years of the UK TV show, I'm sure they shortened the postal address to just the show's name: "You've Been Framed."
I arrived at the same conclusion after thinking about how lazy I could be when scrawling a "From" address on the back of parcels I send.
This works in NL too. Postcode identifies a single street, so you only need to add a house number. Something like `1019 KR 90` will work.
Because most mail is electronically scanned/sorted in the US, you can omit the city and state (though the post office will say no, you can't):
123 Main St.
97201
I did this in 1996, got a friend to send a letter.
Mr XYZ
IBM
I think it took a couple of weeks to get to me - what do I win - .
I guess some people might not know where UK (United Kingdon) is. :)
I am looking at this and thinking of the systems we build (in software) and what we can learn from the sublime postal system.
I once got a letter delivered to me back in 2009/10 with simply 'Free Software Foundation' on the envelope.
In Ireland we have the Eircode system, where each building (even individual apartments) get their own code
In a small town (3000inh) my grandma received a letter with adress
Grandma <town name> <town name>
I have had post before addressed to me using only my full name and my town (pop. 22K).
I know someone who got a letter addressed like this (he was the only doctor in town):
Doctor [ZIP-Code]
Pretty sure Derek and Clive came up with the shortest London address.
Why would he publish his own address for the whole internet to see?
> To avoid doxxing myself, I’ve carefully changed the address readers see.
Because <lack of paranoia> ?
"To avoid doxxing myself, I’ve carefully changed the address readers see."
> To avoid doxxing myself, I’ve carefully changed the address readers see.
TCHO Chocolate used to have the address:
Pier 17
SFHah, I live like 2 roads away from OP. Nice one neighbour!
In the 1990s, I received mail addressed to
<my name> CB3 9AJ
Minimal postal address is:
Building Number/Name Postcode
Postcode is the name of the road or street if its not too long, but some long roads or high density area's may have two or more postcodes for a road or street as do buildings for special entities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcodes_in_the_United_Kingdo...