26 ms·

What is the minimal possible UK address?

• bombcar 4y ago
  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.
  • wjdp 4y ago
    At my university there were postcodes per large building
  • dizhn 4y ago
    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)
• bloak 4y ago
  He should have written 20 SE1 6AD GB and posted it in a different country.
  • vladharbuz 4y ago
    Already on it! :)
    • dmurray 4y ago
      I suppose it depends on the country you post from, but I'd expect "UK" to be more universally understood than "GB".
      • scrollaway 4y ago
        GB is the correct ISO country code for Great Britain.
        • dmurray 4y ago
          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.
          • zinekeller 4y ago
            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/addressingUnit/gbrEn.pdf 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/addressingUnit/gbrFr.pdf 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.
        • reaperducer 4y ago
          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?
        • cassianoleal 4y ago
          Funny, since Great Britain is not a country.
        • ClapperHeid 4y ago
          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!
        • Karellen 4y ago
      • sph 4y ago
        UK is also more correct because it includes Northern Ireland and the other smaller islands (which are not in Great Britain, the main island)
        • jen20 4y ago
          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.
        • closewith 4y ago
          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.
          • dan1234 4y ago
            There's a CCP Grey video which take a decent stab at untangling everything: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10
          • BoxOfRain 4y ago
            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.
            • closewith 4y ago
              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.
      • gpvos 4y ago
        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 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."
  • SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
    It would be one char more minimal if he moves from "SE1" to e.g. the "N1" area.
• uberman 4y ago
  semi related - Address as a hand drawn maps: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-31/with-no-address-a-letter-gets-delivered-via-a-hand-drawn-map-in-iceland https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-31/with-no-a... https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/postman-manages-deliver-letter-only-8997875 https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/postman-manages-del...
  • nathell 4y ago
    Also, Russian post successfully deciphering and delivering a mojibaked address: https://twitter.com/notrevenant/status/993170640625598470 https://twitter.com/notrevenant/status/993170640625598470
• brnt 4y ago
  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.
• BasedInfra 4y ago
  You can put just ‘HMRC’ (UK tax department) on a letter (with paid postage) and it will get to them.
  • ClapperHeid 4y ago
    ...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?
    • voisin 4y ago
      No stamp required is due to “Franking privileges”. Same as in Canada.
      • chipsa 4y ago
        US Congress people also have “franking privileges” but it only applies to outbound, not inbound mail.
    • billpg 4y ago
      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.
      • Y_Y 4y ago
        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.
        • ClapperHeid 4y ago
          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.
• pshirshov 4y ago
  In Ireland it's just XXX XXXX (each property gets assigned with a unique EirCode)
  • notafraudster 4y ago
    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.
  • closewith 4y ago
    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-38m-eircode-system-to-deliver-mail-g685gl6lm https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/an-post-staff-fail-to-use...
    • jimlongton 4y ago
      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-conspiracy-over-awarding-of-eircode-contract/ https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2022/11/28/firm-claims-c...
      • closewith 4y ago
        > 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.
• jakewins 4y ago
  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>
  • blakesterz 4y ago
    I've seen things done like that here in the US also. Something like... First Name, Last Name Blue house down by the creek, next to a yellow shed State, Town, Zip It works, sometimes. I think it's up to the postal carrier if they want to really try or not.
    • kjs3 4y ago
      That'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".
  • sigio 4y ago
    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.
    • Doxin 4y ago
      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.
• rtpg 4y 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!
  • easytiger 4y ago
    A building in the UK with about 300 apartments will prob have around 8 postal codes
    • ben_w 4y ago
      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_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcodes_in_the_United_Kingdo...
• ryanmcdonough 4y ago
  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.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• tetris11 4y ago
  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.
  • pasc1878 4y ago
    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)
    • indigomm 4y ago
      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.
  • didntreadarticl 4y ago
    I've always assumed it but this guy actually tested it out, and so he gets credit for that
• djm_ 4y ago
  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 :)
  • pavanto 4y ago
    How would it work where the house has a name instead of a number e.g. Wisteria cottage, Bristol, BS1 1AA?
    • helsinkiandrew 4y ago
      It would just be 11
    • qubex 4y ago
      I presume that ‘hashes’ to 11.
      • djm_ 4y ago
        Correct. Which means if you’re taking deliveries it’s probably better to have a house number as you get validated more frequently.
        • vmilner 4y ago
          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.
• dmd 4y ago
  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
• jmclnx 4y ago
  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.
  • reaperducer 4y ago
    Think of it as a checksum, not an IP address.
  • bombcar 4y ago
    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.
• l8again 4y ago
  I am looking at this and thinking of the systems we build (in software) and what we can learn from the sublime postal system.
• simonjgreen 4y ago
  Reminds me of this wonderful post, primarily UK oriented. Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-addresses/ https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...
  • thequux 4y ago
    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.
• preinheimer 4y ago
  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.
• ezoe 4y ago
  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.
• Nextgrid 4y ago
  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?
  • bombcar 4y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxCha4Kez9c 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.
• cryvate1284 4y ago
  In terms of buildings/mail unit, an example of a post code in the UK would be CB2 1TQ which is for Trinity College.
• naturalauction 4y ago
  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.
• nathell 4y ago
  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.
  • bombcar 4y ago
    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.
• dmurray 4y ago
  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.
  • moremetadata 4y ago
    > 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-read-sealed-17th-century-letter-without-opening-virtual-unfolding-x-ray https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/02/researchers-re...
    • jcrawfordor 4y ago
      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.
      • moremetadata 4y ago
        > 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.
• moremetadata 4y ago
  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_Kingdom#Special_postcodes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcodes_in_the_United_Kingdo...
• bstpierre 4y ago
  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.
• hprotagonist 4y ago
  https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-35174646 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-35174646 "ENGLAND" seems sufficient!
  • twic 4y ago
    > 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!
• ronnykylin 4y ago
  It is like the world's youngest time capsule, only a couple of days old.
• YoooThere 4y ago
  This reminds me of the Derek & Clive sketch where a letter of complaint is addressed to the Director General of the BBC: C**, London
• aisio 4y ago
  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=20 https://twitter.com/weefeargal/status/1479069076144234497?s=...
  • vinay427 4y ago
    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.
    • dingaling 4y ago
      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.
      • wrgef 4y ago
        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-an-post-doesnt-use-eircodes 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.
        • wiredfool 4y ago
          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. Name Eircode Ireland also makes it reasonably common that you won't have a number in the address. Someone Foo House Town Co Meath Ireland Is a perfectly reasonable and somewhat common address.
• pavlov 4y ago
  In Finland, you can send a letter to Santa Claus with only this address: Joulupukki 99999 Korvatunturi Where "Joulupukki" is the Finnish name for Santa, and "Korvatunturi" is the mountain where he supposedly lives. Postal code 99999 was reserved for this purpose.
  • ClapperHeid 4y ago
    >and "Korvatunturi" is the mountain where he supposedly lives... But then the Post Office nearest that mountain would have to re-direct all those letters to the North Pole... where he actually lives!
    • pavlov 4y ago
      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.
  • bombcar 4y ago
    The USPS has used 88888 for this: https://about.usps.com/holidaynews/operation-santa.htm https://about.usps.com/holidaynews/operation-santa.htm
• petercooper 4y ago
  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/ 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..(!) ;-)
  • bombcar 4y ago
    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.
  • djhworld 4y ago
    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.
• polakmaly 4y ago
  Why would he publish his own address for the whole internet to see?
  • dboreham 4y ago
    Because <lack of paranoia> ?
  • jaclaz 4y ago
    > To avoid doxxing myself, I’ve carefully changed the address readers see.
  • dghf 4y ago
    > To avoid doxxing myself, I’ve carefully changed the address readers see.
  • nelblu 4y ago
    "To avoid doxxing myself, I’ve carefully changed the address readers see."
• corobo 4y ago
  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.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• ShaneMcGowan 4y ago
  In Ireland we have the Eircode system, where each building (even individual apartments) get their own code
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• mannykannot 4y ago
  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.
• jen20 4y ago
  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>".
• willyt 4y ago
  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.
  • BrandoElFollito 4y ago
    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"
  • bombcar 4y ago
    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.
  • tomatocracy 4y ago
    > ... 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.
• micromacrofoot 4y ago
  Reminds me that https://what3words.com/ 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
  • Prunkton 4y ago
    this was my first thought reading the comments well at least there is some recent activity https://nitter.net/what3words https://nitter.net/what3words
• Archelaos 4y ago
  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 is the address of the city hall. One should get away with using the number plate abbriviation "MA" for "Mannheim". So something like H5 68159 MA should work too. And since the zip code identifies the city H5 68159 might work as well. And perhaps even H5 MA or simply H5 if you post the letter in Mannheim itself. 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.
• Scoundreller 4y ago
  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!
  • hackernewds 4y ago
    this would produce all sorts of issues with logistics algorithms. e commerce delivery for example
  • belter 4y ago
    Did sites proposed to show you a list of hot singles in your postal code?
• jrochkind1 4y ago
  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 It would get there! You might want to add a "Box" before the "1034" to be safe -- and to disambiguate between a house number, as in OP? (I'm not sure just a house number would ever work in the USA?) 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.
  • hackernewds 4y ago
    YMMV depending on the driver
    • jrochkind1 4y ago
      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!
  • TravisLS 4y ago
    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.
    • polygotdomain 4y ago
      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.
      • greenyoda 4y ago
        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.)
• petesergeant 4y ago
  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...
• madcaptenor 4y ago
  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+10011/@40.7324898,-73.99932,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m6!3m5!1s0x89c259972d1ec2bf:0x3876f855c93b61c!8m2!3d40.7324858!4d-73.997126!16s%2Fg%2F11g0tc70r0 https://www.google.com/maps/place/6+W+8th+St,+New+York,+NY+1...
  • 1-more 4y ago
    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.
    • lxgr 4y ago
      A ZIP code (even just the 5-digit one) should disambiguate all of that though, right?
      • 1-more 4y ago
        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-own-zip-code/ https://convene.com/catalyst/office/buildings-new-york-city-...
• rax0m 4y ago
  Olga 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). [0]: https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olga_Boberg https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olga_Boberg
  • pyb 4y ago
    There was a time in the 60s when letters to "Daniel, Paris" went to Daniel Filipacchi.
  • cauthon 4y ago
    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?
    • HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
      It works for Santa !
    • Symbiote 4y ago
      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.
      • dfxm12 4y ago
        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...
        • dhosek 4y ago
          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.
• rahimnathwani 4y ago
  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.
  • bombcar 4y ago
    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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxCha4Kez9c
• seanhunter 4y ago
  Some brilliant examples of postal detective work in Ireland documented here https://www.quora.com/Can-you-send-mail-in-Ireland-with-the-address-and-name-info-in-Irish 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 IRELAND
  • dghf 4y ago
    My 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-all-the-way-to-the-dail-without-an-address-324463 https://www.her.ie/amp/lol/unbelievable-this-letter-made-it-...
    • seanhunter 4y ago
      That is legitimately spectacular.
    • piperswe 4y ago
      Non-AMP link: https://www.her.ie/lol/unbelievable-this-letter-made-it-all-the-way-to-the-dail-without-an-address-324463 https://www.her.ie/lol/unbelievable-this-letter-made-it-all-...
    • kjs3 4y ago
      I wonder how they determined it was for that pack of gobshites, and not the band[1]. Penmanship? Cheery stamp? [1] https://www.thegobshites.com/ https://www.thegobshites.com/
      • mr_toad 4y ago
        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.
• kraftman 4y ago
  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-instead-of-addresses-on-letters-for-the-postman-to-deliver-4801210/ https://metro.co.uk/2014/07/17/prankster-writes-puzzles-inst...
  • invalidusernam3 4y ago
    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.
• rogy 4y ago
  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.
  • dboreham 4y ago
    I suspect there are databases that will geolocate such an address.
    • madjam002 4y ago
      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.
      • _-____-_ 4y ago
        The official one provided by Royal Mail is called the Postcode Address File (PAF) [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcode_Address_File https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcode_Address_File
        • madjam002 4y ago
          That doesn’t provide any geolocation information (unless it’s changed recently?), for that you need OS AddressBase
    • michaelt 4y ago
      One such database is https://www.royalmail.com/find-a-postcode https://www.royalmail.com/find-a-postcode
• andix 4y ago
  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
  • Symbiote 4y ago
    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.
    • andix 4y ago
      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 ;)
      • Symbiote 4y ago
        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: Royal Mail Sheffield Delivery Office Pond Street Sheffield S1 1AA 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. It's fairly common to use the abbreviated addresses when handwriting a return address.
• nickdothutton 4y ago
  I have had post before addressed to me using only my full name and my town (pop. 22K).
  • andix 4y ago
    I know someone who got a letter addressed like this (he was the only doctor in town): Doctor [ZIP-Code]
• showerst 4y ago
  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-bear-reveal-promise-hope-future 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!
• HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
  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!
  • michaelt 4y ago
    > 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!
    • lmm 4y ago
      > 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.
      • tokamak-teapot 4y ago
        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.
  • simmonmt 4y ago
    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 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.
• mastax 4y ago
  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.
  • xoxxala 4y ago
    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.
    • knodi123 4y ago
      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.
  • lsllc 4y ago
    I recall that Costa Rican addresses are more like directions: https://www.crcdaily.com/p/why-doesnt-costa-rica-use-real-addresses https://www.crcdaily.com/p/why-doesnt-costa-rica-use-real-ad...
    • SirMonkey 4y ago
      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
• jlarcombe 4y ago
  Apsley House famously has (or had?) the address "Number 1, London".
  • zwischenzug 4y ago
    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-address-no-1-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.
    • jlarcombe 4y ago
      I am now that parent
• raldi 4y ago
  TCHO Chocolate used to have the address: Pier 17 SF
• Havoc 4y ago
  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
  • pasc1878 4y ago
    And that is why I can't use some sites. There are two number 1s in my postcode
• belter 4y ago
  Time for a Classic (could not find it on YouTube) UK House Numbers: https://www.facebook.com/BBCArchive/videos/1961-tonight-house-numbers/512402056068261/ https://www.facebook.com/BBCArchive/videos/1961-tonight-hous...
• TuringNYC 4y ago
  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)
  • tfsh 4y ago
    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.
    • Symbiote 4y ago
      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.
  • londons_explore 4y ago
    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).
  • OJFord 4y ago
    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).
• passion__desire 4y ago
  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-he-is https://zikredilli.com/delhi-depository/f/to-gandhi-wherever...
• mcv 4y ago
  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.
• makapuf 4y ago
  In a small town (3000inh) my grandma received a letter with adress Grandma <town name> <town name>
• robga 4y ago
  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/freedomofinformationfoi/numberofukpostcodeswhichonlyhaveonehousehold https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/fre...
  • mytailorisrich 4y ago
    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.
    • kjs3 4y ago
      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.
      • jcranmer 4y ago
        The Pentagon manages to have at least 6 zip codes assigned to it (each branch has its own zip code).
        • robga 4y ago
          In the UK, with its more granular postcodes, office buildings can have one or more postcodes per floor.
        • drexlspivey 4y ago
          It’s mildly annoying that there are 6 branches in The Pentagon
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• m-i-l 4y ago
  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).
  • wrboyce 4y ago
    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.
• theginger 4y ago
  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.
  • Aromasin 4y ago
    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?
    • TRiG_Ireland 4y ago
      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.
    • nimro 4y ago
      You can order a new V5C online: https://www.gov.uk/vehicle-log-book https://www.gov.uk/vehicle-log-book
    • PuffinBlue 4y ago
• ajb 4y ago
  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.
• avocadoLife 4y ago
  Hah, I live like 2 roads away from OP. Nice one neighbour!
• frou_dh 4y ago
  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.
• jmfldn 4y ago
  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.
  • Sharlin 4y ago
    You might want to read the (short) article ;)
    • jmfldn 4y ago
      Ha, fair challenge. OK, turns out I was right at least. :)
• bfirsh 4y ago
  If you enjoyed this, you might also enjoy this: https://www.meversusanpost.com/ https://www.meversusanpost.com/ Somebody who does this for fun, normally with some kind of puzzle that needs solving to get the address.
• Laaas 4y ago
  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 https://goo.gl/maps/bDSFp1U1PNtBpUad6 More information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• rootusrootus 4y ago
  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. [0] https://tools.usps.com/zip-code-lookup.htm?byaddress https://tools.usps.com/zip-code-lookup.htm?byaddress
  • kube-system 4y ago
    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)
• skrebbel 4y ago
  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.
  • gpvos 4y ago
    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.
    • messe 4y ago
      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.
      • rdlw 4y ago
        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-all-the-way-to-the-dail-without-an-address-324463 https://www.her.ie/amp/lol/unbelievable-this-letter-made-it-...
    • justincormack 4y ago
      It is the case in the UK (house numbers or names, houses don't have to have numbers)
  • amichal 4y ago
    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
• donatj 4y ago
  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.
• avalore 4y ago
  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.
  • notahacker 4y ago
    I have a friend in Chamonix I could try this with!
• domh 4y ago
  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.
• gumby 4y ago
  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?
  • quercusa 4y ago
    'HM' ?
    • messe 4y ago
      Would a crown (U+1F451) count as a single character? I wonder if writing down the unicode codepoint would work...
      • gumby 4y ago
        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)
  • Symbiote 4y ago
    SW1A 1AA is Buckingham Palace. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SW_postcode_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SW_postcode_area
• poulsbohemian 4y ago
  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?
• udev 4y ago
  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.
  • lurker_jMckQT99 4y ago
    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")
• HL33tibCe7 4y ago
  See also: * https://twitter.com/weefeargal/status/1479069076144234497?s=46&t=gekCRqXrdinWKlaYS-Mn0A https://twitter.com/weefeargal/status/1479069076144234497?s=... * https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1342102/amp/How-Royal-Mails-detective-skills-delivered-letter-vague-address.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1342102/amp/How-Roy... * https://www.irishpost.com/news/irish-postman-miraculously-delivers-letter-i-forgot-street-name-near-cul-de-sac-113193 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-delivered-successfully-irish-town https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/67207/letter-no-address-... * https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/postman-manages-deliver-letter-only-8997875.amp https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/postman-manages-del... (possibly my favourite) Good old posties
• forinti 4y ago
  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.
  • padjo 4y ago
    That’s exactly how Irish post codes work and only use 7 chars: https://www.eircode.ie/ https://www.eircode.ie/ Although a check digit would have been worth it IMO
• 4ndrewl 4y ago
  Pretty sure Derek and Clive came up with the shortest London address.
• flir 4y ago
  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.
• quitit 4y ago
  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.
• 6c696e7578 4y ago
  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.
• PaulHoule 4y ago
  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.
• ricardobayes 4y ago
  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.
  • jum4 4y ago
    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.
• supernova87a 4y ago
  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.
  • 1-more 4y ago
    I've heard this story with "MASS" and being delivered in Massachusetts.
    • supernova87a 4y ago
      Ah yes that's probably it. I'm just remembering it vaguely.
• sib 4y ago
  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).
• dhosek 4y ago
  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).
• losvedir 4y ago
  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...
  • OnlyMortal 4y ago
    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.
    • nobody9999 4y ago
      >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... [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4WGNjSYKNU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4WGNjSYKNU
• sequoia 4y ago
  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!
  • kjs3 4y ago
    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.
  • disjunct 4y ago
    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.
    • sequoia 4y ago
      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.
• _a_a_a_ 4y ago
  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. Was interpreted as John Underwood, Andover, Hants. And it was claimed, eventually directly delivered. Supposedly Edit: that and a few more, including (if true) and incredible address of just C B N B
• unglaublich 4y ago
  Netherlands: each street has a unique postal code and number. So your unique address would be something like `2800AA 2`. Or `8440HK 14a`.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• knodi123 4y ago
  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.
  • Oxidation 4y ago
    0N0E, maybe (Null Island)? Depending on if latitude and longitude count as coded or not. Otherwise "Burj tip" could be quite good (centimetres).
    • knodi123 4y ago
      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.
      • Symbiote 4y ago
        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.
  • was_a_dev 4y ago
    "S Pole"? Six characters for an exact point on Earth.
    • mttch 4y ago
      Possibly ambiguous by a few km, as it could be the geographic South Pole, the magnetic South Pole or even the geomagnetic South Pole.
      • jwilk 4y ago
• jamesgill 4y ago
  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
• glonq 4y ago
  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?
  • TMWNN 4y 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-is-back/ https://gringopost.com/2023/02/17/postal-service-of-ecuador-...>
• mattl 4y ago
  I once got a letter delivered to me back in 2009/10 with simply 'Free Software Foundation' on the envelope.
• Kwpolska 4y ago
  > 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.)
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• DrBazza 4y ago
  1, London. https://londonist.com/2016/06/why-does-apsley-house-have-the-address-no-1-london https://londonist.com/2016/06/why-does-apsley-house-have-the...
• hdaz0017 4y ago
  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. :)
• base3 4y ago
  In the 1990s, I received mail addressed to <my name> CB3 9AJ
• sprabbage 4y ago
  (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.
• johnorourke 4y ago
  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."
• burnt-croissant 4y ago
  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?
  • chipsa 4y ago
    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.
• marstall 4y ago
  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?
  • marstall 4y ago
    or to get as short as possible "1 A" (for A Street)
• varenc 4y ago
  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.
• suid 4y ago
  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 and is supposed to be read as "John Underwood, Andover, Hants"
• Daviey 4y ago
  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".
• fennecfoxy 4y ago
  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).
• jum4 4y ago
  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.