What is the minimal possible UK address?(microblog.vladh.net) |
What is the minimal possible UK address?(microblog.vladh.net) |
123 Main St.
97201
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. :)
Grandma <town name> <town name>
Doctor [ZIP-Code]
Pier 17
SF<my name> CB3 9AJ
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...
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
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.
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 ;)
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.
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.
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.
There's a specific branch of the post office that works on these - the dead letter office: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxCha4Kez9c
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?
Apparently so! <https://gringopost.com/2023/02/17/postal-service-of-ecuador-...>
01004-0072 US
Joulupukki 99999 Korvatunturi
Postal code 99999 was reserved for this purpose.
>and "Korvatunturi" is the mountain where he supposedly lives...
He also has a tourist trap at Rovaniemi (a city in Lapland) where the letters actually end up.
UK House Numbers:
https://www.facebook.com/BBCArchive/videos/1961-tonight-hous...
Could the number of characters be reduced?
But he's wrong - "1 London" works as an address. It's Apsley House.
It just said:
Wood
John
Hants
That is, if you have a name unique enough in that area.
I’ve even seen buildings where different floors have diff codes
There are two number 1s in my postcode
And I would receive mail to "[lastname] [ZIP + 4]" (when I lived in New York City).
It could be quite short: four letters and four digits would give you nearly half a billion possibilities.
Although a check digit would have been worth it IMO
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).
Somebody who does this for fun, normally with some kind of puzzle that needs solving to get the address.
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.
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.
Part of it can come down to if the postman wants to bother to figure it out.
¿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.)
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.
Seems this is also not some special knowledge as all of his friends did the same.
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!
Often we put the house number and postcode on the back of the envelope as a sender address.
So, a full address could be: 1540 AB 1.
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.
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?
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.
Wood,
John,
Hants.
John Underwood,
Andover,
Hants.
Edit: that and a few more, including (if true) and incredible address of just
C B N BLike "top of the great pyramid", for example, looks like it is a 200 sq ft area, in 25 characters of message.
Otherwise "Burj tip" could be quite good (centimetres).
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.
U-995 gets you an ovoid 67.10 metres by 6.20 metres.
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.
However it's a good show of how much ink/time is wasted normally on letters with useless data.
* 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
(obviously a lot more bits than simply writing the address)
Royal Mail
Sheffield Delivery Office
Pond Street
Sheffield
S1 1AA
It's fairly common to use the abbreviated addresses when handwriting a return address.
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.
This was in the early 90's. I wonder how effective this would be now with more automated systems in use.
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!
well at least there is some recent activity https://nitter.net/what3words
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.
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...
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.
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.
20
SE1 6AD
GB
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?
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.
>> 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 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).
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).
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.
<my parents’ names> <town name>
where the town has circa 3K inhabitants.
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).
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_Property_Reference_Numb...
Source: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/an-post-staff-fail-to-use...
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...
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..(!) ;-)
I've never tried it personally.
C**, London
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.
However, they can appear a bit random here and have a resolution of about three or four properties.
The USPS wanted everyone to know about zip codes and provided a musical tutorial[0] as to why zip codes were a good idea...
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.
For example, sometimes your tax return will have its own zip code in the USA.
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 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.
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.
This is called "cachet de la Poste faisant foi"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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."
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.
...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.
Wikipedia says "Great Britain is an island in the North Atlantic Ocean", although historically there was also the Kingdom of Great Britain.
But is the mail in the source country sorted by people, computers programmed by people, or by the ISO committee?
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!
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.
Claims of Antarctic territory aren't recognised internationally, so the codes were removed, but it used to have the code BQ.
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.
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/iso3166Students 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).
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".
Man, that's some serious organizational ethic! If only both companies and people were as exact today...
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...
No 8.8.8.8 here, try over there ...
He told me that he could get successfully receive mail addressed to
Cletus
Vatican
I'm told that letters were addressed simply, "Lorien, [town name]"
Not as impressive as Olga, of course, but close!
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...
For US post office boxes you can just write the full 9-digit zip code.
""Dear God" letters are sent to Mail Recovery offices or local churches."
Although that's also an address with it's own postcode, so "SW1A 2AA" would also get there.
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
IRELANDIt 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.
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 :)
"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...
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
Thorvald
The forest by <tiny village in Sweden>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.
- 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.
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.
First Name, Last Name
Blue house down by the creek, next to a yellow shed
State, Town, Zip
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.
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.
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
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.
- 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).
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.
(it is also processed [my guess would be by volunteers too] and kids receive a proper answer letter back from "Santa, North Pole")
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)
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.
https://twitter.com/weefeargal/status/1479069076144234497?s=...
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.
https://www.irishmirror.ie/sport/rugby-union/times-bizarre-i...
And as already mentioned - it's used by some automated sorting (I believe) but last mile delivery doesn't use it (aiui).
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-31/with-no-a...
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/postman-manages-del...
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.
[0] https://zikredilli.com/delhi-depository/f/to-gandhi-wherever...
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
"ENGLAND" seems sufficient!
That's a multi-stage letter, not fair!
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.
So presumably...
<MP name>
HP
...with no stamp on the envelope could theoretically work.
Now, which MP has the shortest name?
I daresay "A Mak" or "R Huq" would work too.
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!
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...
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-...
Just as well their boat wasn't called Kingfisher or Meander...
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 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!
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.
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
PO 1234 NY, NY 10010
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.
Is it cheating if I put a photo of the house on the envelope?
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.
Room number
9-digit zip
219
65432-9876
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/you-can-mail-coconut-a...
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.
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.
The most famous example of this is the zip code 12345, which is actually for GE in Schenectady, NY.
https://www.crcdaily.com/p/why-doesnt-costa-rica-use-real-ad...
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>
Another reason why addresses should just be multi-line text boxes.
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!
Huh? I was always taught to put your address on the back.
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!
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?
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.
https://convene.com/catalyst/office/buildings-new-york-city-...
Oh, and: mokas farakas!
https://www.her.ie/amp/lol/unbelievable-this-letter-made-it-...
I found this
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/devon/6226641.stm
But that isn't it either.
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.
PM
HP
Might work. Maybe I should go and parcel up some dogshit and try it.
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.
e.g.
Name
Eircode
Someone
Foo House
Town
Co Meath
Ireland
The following format is probably the most common:
Name
Townland
Co. County
Ireland
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.
I'm sure you only hear about the success stories.
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 :)
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.
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...
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.
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".
I doubt my letter was directly read by the minister,
We seem to be in agreement.
Excellent book has a collection of such letters.
“Reagan: A Life In Letters“