zlacker

This is a tangent, but addresses are also way more complicated than most people realize - especially if you’re relying on a user to input a correct address or if you need to support multiple countries, somewhere with unique addresses like Queens[0], or you need to differentiate between units of a specific street address that uses something other than unit numbers for a unit designation.

At that point you need something like Smarty[1] to validate and parse addresses.

[0]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2783155/how-to-distingui...

[1]: https://www.smarty.com/

>>ericra+(OP)
Yes, unfortunately, their assertion that everyone knows their zip code is wrong. People often write a neighboring code, and the post office just delivers it.

Similar issues for city name, of course.

>>nitwit+D5
Very common in NYC. People will use all of "New York, NY", "Queens, NY", or "Astoria, NY" all interchangeably and the post office will still just deliver it to the same place.

>>ericra+(OP)
An annoyance for me is that I've yet to see any address validator get my current home address right. They all insist my address is on the road that leads to my road rather than my actual road. It's understandable that they can't be 100% accurate given the scale / complexity of addresses.

Most sites/apps will let me override the validator, but a few won't. The most common ones that insist on using the wrong address are financial institutions that say the law requires them to have my proper physical address and therefore they go with the (incorrectly) validated version.

USPS does not do home delivery in our area, and UPS/FedEx/etc. usually figure it out given that street numbers alone uniquely identify properties in our town.

>>rented+Rd
Same! My wife ran a business from home during the pandemic and we actually went through the effort to work with Google Maps (they called us) to get it on the map. And of course USPS has no problem. But our address was originally a federal building with a letter, still only has a letter, no number, and there are now all sorts of work-arounds floating around on how resolve addresses in our neighborhood. What's wild is the Post Office is literally down the street from our house, and our house predates the founding of most of the big delivery services, which all manage to deliver to us, given their preferred incantation. If I can't get the shipper to pass the right incantation to their shipping service, shenanigans ensue. My (least?) favorite was an item that went across the Pacific Ocean 3 times over the course of 3 months.

>>ericra+(OP)
Just last week I had to deal with the fact that my house has the wrong address in multiple databases because things changed when an interstate went in 40-something years ago. It's not a big change--main st. vs N main st. but it was enough to mess up various things. Not as much as when I moved in 30 years ago but still enough to be wrong in old town and telco records. Took me a couple of days to get a permit issued to get electrical hooked back up after a fire as a result because apparently some town clerk insisted the address wasn't valid.

>>nitwit+D5
This sounds like the person doesn't know the receiver's zip code. Why are you extending that to not knowing their own zip code? Are they mailing something to themselves?

>>steeze+gj
People often give out their mailing address, and may be misinformed about their zip code.

If you get close enough, it usually gets handled in the local sort, but not always.

On cities, the mailing address city really is the name of the post office that handles your delivery route. Often there's a relationship with the city you live in, but there's cases both ways --- I used to live outside city limits, we had a census designated place name, a municipal sanitary district and had a fire department at one time... but never a post office, so our mailing address used the nearby city name, where our post office resided. The place name had an incorporated city on the other side of the state, so using that wouldn't be great.

Nowadays, post offices often have a list of alternative place names, so where I live now, I can pick between the incorporated city name, the nearby large city where a post office that processes all my mail is located, or any of the numerous small post offices that once served my city.

>>ericra+(OP)
Addresses are a huge ordeal in banking. Easily one of the most tortured domain types when it comes to edge cases and integration pain.

Every customer I've worked with insisted on having all addresses ran through the USPS verification API so they could get their bulk mailing discounts.

Even if you get the delivery/cost side under control, you still have to make sure you are talking about the right address from a logical perspective. Mailing, physical, seasonal, etc. address types add a whole extra dimension of fun.

>>nitwit+D5
They know their ZIP code far, far better than any other plausible geographic cell.

>>steeze+gj
People more or less mail themselves parcels all the time, with online delivery.

>>wisty+WP
Ha you make an excellent point actually. I wasn't even thinking of that.

>>ericra+(OP)
Thanks for the shout-out. Founder of Smarty here.

Regarding article, it really depends on the use case of whether to use ZIP Code (TM), postal code, Canada Post Forward Sortation Area, lat/lon, Census Bureau block and tract, etc.

As has been noted, the ZIP Code is often good enough for aggregating data together and can be a good first step if you don’t know where to start.

>>rented+Rd
Send your address to support@smarty.com and link to this HN thread. I’ll keep an eye watching out for it. I’d love to see what our system does with your address.

We have non-postal addresses and a lot of other mechanisms to help here. We also have contacts at the USPS and others to help fix addresses.

>>killjo+7h
I just replied to an earlier message on this thread with the same offer:

I’d love to have you email your mailing address to support@smarty.com with a link to this HN thread. We may be able to help fix some of this.

>>toast0+2l
> On cities, the mailing address city really is the name of the post office that handles your delivery route.

Bigger cities can have multiple post offices and zip codes with the same mail address city.

>>VWWHFS+g9
This is sort of apocryphal - and also anecdotal because I have my own personal experience living in an annexed Boston neighborhood to draw on - but in a lot of the towns/neighborhoods that have been annexed by Boston, people still use the neighborhood name[1] as the city name because you are more likely to get your package when you indicate which “Washington St,” “Boylston St,” etc. you actually live at.

According to one commenter on the subject:

  It doesn't matter, as long as the zip code is correct

[0]: https://www.city-data.com/forum/boston/601106-mailing-addres...

[1]: https://www.city-data.com/forum/boston/601106-mailing-addres...

>>steeze+gj
I will occasionally still try to use the zip code for my old work address (from about a year before covid) when what I want is my home address.

>>ghaff+Wi
Here is a little-known (but very useful piece of information).

The US Postal Services has a team of people that handle address updates. This team is localized to different regions so that they generally are aware of local nuances. If you need to talk to the USPS about getting an address issue resolved simply go to this USPS AMS site and enter your zipcode to find the team that handles addresses in that area:

https://postalpro.usps.com/ppro-tools/address-management-sys...

If they don't answer, leave a message. They have helped me thousands of times in my last 14 years working with address validations.

>>jwnacn+lz2
The USPS has always been correct since I moved in. It’s been local records and the telcos that have been the problem.

And in this case the fire companies had no problem finding my house in spite of the incorrect information in town records. As you suggest the field people on the ground generally know what the ground truth is.