I’m sending a package to the UK, FedEx doesn’t like the postcode and I’m having no luck with the postcode finder. According to this, the alpha/numbers don’t look right. I’ve got:
Recipient Family
66 Sehrington Road
London, England SW6 33A
Anyone know what it should be?
The format is usually: Letter Letter Number (Possible second number) Space Number Letter Letter.
Going by this, your second 3 is wrong.
I checked on Streetmap.co.uk and it should be 3BA. If this is correct, you have also spelled the streetname wrong.
Our postcodes suck, by the way. Zip codes are much better.
Good man jjim! I was thinking it was 3BA, but that wasn’t working…probably because the street was, as you guessed, misspelled.
Streetmap.co.uk looks pretty useful. It has been bookmarked.
Why? They give a modicum of indication of geographic location, and also number/letter combinations are easier to remember than numbers alone.
The possible second numer in the first group and the space - which is often omitted, making the second number in the first group possible ambiguous - makes it a bit tricky for programmers. Nothing insurmountable, just tricky.
Postcodes are pretty much obsolete anyway.
Australian postcodes only have four digits, so in terms of suckiness, ours manage to out-suck both the UK’s postcode system and the USA’s zip codes. Nonetheless, in all three countries, most of the mail the average punter receives these days is business mail rather than hand-addressed stuff, and the majority of the business mail is barcoded. At worst, these barcodes will enable sortation (such a wonderfully ugly word - my bosses use it) down to the individual postman’s beat, and at best, they’ll provide your specific address with an identifier unique in the entire country.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see the postcode and zip systems gone withing ten years.
Except how would you address something by hand?
And what about when there are multiple identical addresses?
For instance, do a search on streetmap.co.uk for the London street called ‘London Road’. A postcode sure helps sort that lot out.
Not to mention being able to address envelopes with just house number and postcode (eg “22 SE19 2BJ”) is nifty.
They’re far from obsolete in the UK, in fact, only postcode and street number/building name are necessary on a piece of mail to get it there. Postcodes (despite their awkwardness) are used by many organisations outside of the Royal mail system, including, but by no means limited to, other delivery services and freight carriers; they sell the database so that companies can auto-fill address information using only postcode and house number.
They’re not going away anytime soon here - quite the contrary, I would say - the other, human-readable address fields might become redundant sooner (which still might be never).
It’s rare to have two identical addresses. What you describe would theoretically happen, but it would be so rare as to be not really worth worrying about.
As an example, a typical US address might be:
37 Maple St
Springfield (state abbreviation)
There are lots of Springfields in the US, but you’d need two in the same state for starters. The state alone would generally suffice.
The OCR tech used by the world’s postal administrations (in developed countries at least) can handle a significant percentage of hand addressed mail as well as the printed stuff. Even if it can’t for some, the workload removed by having the bulk of the mail machine-readable will enable a handful of human sorters to sit down and quickly sort the remainder the old fashioned way. So in a sense, even mail which the machines can’t handle is helped by the machines.
As the technology currently stands (and it’s always improving), the OCR software will use various address attributes to cross-reference against one another in order to verify a correct sorting location. So, if there is more than one town with the same name, it will verify this with a street name matched against the town name. The post/zip code is now just another way to verify the address. The machine will either be able to read the address (most of the time) or it will go to a human sorter. The human will sort it the old fashioned way (placenames memorised by rote), and I know that when I’m sorting mail, I rarely even look at the code. Mail operated for a century or more without them, and did okay.
If you print the address neatly and legibly, and include the state, it would be an insignificant fraction of mail that would have more than one potential delivery point. It would probably be cheaper and easier to change a handful of street names across the country than to force everyone to persevere with a code system that is past its expiry date.
You’re right, but they’re obsolete in the sense that town name and street number could do the same. The postcodes are there, so why not use them? In other words, in the UK as in Australia, a letter with just the street address (sans town /suburb name) and the postcode will get there, but so will a letter with the town name but no postcode. In a sense, it’s the same info twice.
Aaah, no. You’re right about the human-readable stuff, but that’s not what I mean. The postcode system itself is of mid-20th century origin and is designed to be (reasonably) human-friendly. I’m talking about its eventual replacement by the very human-unfriendly barcodes, which contain vastly more information.
I remember reading that postcodes are not actually used in the Royal Mail system - internally, mail is sorted using the Mailsort code.
If you look at any piece of business mail that goes to a UK address, chances are you’ll see this five digit code in one corner of the address label. Bulk mailers get discounts if they use the code on their mail. Mere mortals use the postcode, which is then converted to Mailsort by the Royal Mail equipment.
Yep.
I operate Lockheed martin MLOCR units, and these are already ten year-old technology, but they do this. I can set the thing to read the entire address (useful for say ex-overseas mail or mail lodged in street pillar boxes, which has lots of hand-addressed stuff), and the machine will scan the entire address and then it will print its own barcode. Conversely, if I’m running a bulk business lodgement, say bank account statements, and they’re pre-barcoded by the customer, I can turn the setting down to read only the barcode, and you can see the machine speed up to about twice as fast, because it doesn’t have to concern itself with the cumbersome postcodes which it needs to cross-reference. The barcodes are like mainlining speed for the machine. It puts up with the old human postcodes only under protest.
The postcodes are there because Royal Mail have campaigned strenuously and at length to get people to use them. Mail with street name and town will probably get there, but addressed that way, there is much greater possibility of ambiguous addresses.
For perhaps the best example of such ambiguity, try searching for a GB place called Newtown on http://streetmap.co.uk/ - there are tens, possibly hundreds of villages and towns called Newtown in our tiny land; there are duplicates of them in the same county and even in the same postal district. - here and here, for example, are two Newtowns near me that are only a couple of miles apart.
They do have unique postcodes though, which is why Royal Mail keeps telling us to use them.
Other sorting and addressing methods exist, but many of them start with the postcode as their index.
I might be wrong about this, but I don’t think Postcode and MailSort are quite the same animal; mailsort is a sorting and routing code, isn’t it? What is the smallest addressable area by Mailsort?
Even better example: “The Street, Sutton” - could be in Norfolk, Suffolk or West Sussex, while “High Street, Sutton” could be Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire or Surrey.
One reason postcodes aren’t going anywhere soon is that all other institutions seem now to be irreparably tied to them. So much so that I can’t get a chequebook, credit card, or even fill in the online voter registration form, because I’ve been out of the country for ages and have no UK postcode covering my last three years’ habitation. ::ends thread quickly before he bursts into tears of impotent rage::
jjimm - can’t remember if I’ve suggested this before, but you can add previous addresses directly to your Experian credit record here (30 day free trial)
The technology exists right now to do away with postcodes. I do concede there is a greater problem in the UK because in a place like London, the entire metropolis seems to use “London” as their town/city name, relying on the postcode to route the thing correctly. Here in Australia, “Sydney” is only an area about a mile long by half a mile wide, and although I live close to the geographical centre of the metropolis, the word “Sydney” doesn’t appear in my address anywhere. I’m in the suburb of Belmore, and there are four hundred others in Sydney.
But if the Brits use a county name or abbreviation, the problem of things like the Newtown example is greatly reduced.
I do believe that postcodes will go away. The fact that the likes on insurance companies and banks use them in their databases is just a convenience to those institutions, and I’m sure the Royal Mail would care not one iota about them when it’s looking after its own interests. All those institutions would need to do is update their software and use town and county names instead of postcodes, so that’s not such a big deal.
It’s true that the barcodes or lengthy routing codes used internally do contain the postcode, but that’s just a result of the way it’s evolved, and it’s easier to do it that way. This doesn’t mean there’s anything inherently superior about them, and if they were building a postal system from scratch it would likely be different.
In Australia, every single individual address in the country has a barcode, and the database can be purchased from Australia Post for use by business. The decision was taken here in the 1960s to go with a simple four digit postcode. This was a controversial decision, because at the time the UK and US had more complex codes that could sort finer. The rationale here was that relying on the customer to apply the correct code is a bit dodgy (about 5 or 10 per cent of handwritten mail has a wrong or missing postcode). Anyway, forty years later and our simple codes are no longer a cause for concern because the barcodes enable sorting as finely as is done in countries with long and complex codes. This illustrates how superfluous the codes really are.
In fact, the relatively high percentage of incorrect codes is a strong reason for them to be done away with.
Of course, mail volumes did rise during the 1990s, when everybody was predicting email would kill the post office, but now the email has finally started to bite and the volumes are dropping noticeably, so who knows where we’ll be in ten years?
Perhaps so, but whatever replaces them will be rather similar to postcodes.
No, it absolutely isn’t - did you do the streetmap search on Newtown? There are fifteen places called Newtown in Hampshire alone, plus another three that have names including the word ‘Newtown’ in them, and of course this is only one example of a type; there are loads of places called ‘West End’ - many of them duplicates within the same county; there are two Northbrooks in Hampshire; I could go on, and on, and on.