Question for non Americans - mailing addresses

In My Humble Opinion
21

The Cayman Islands Postal Service does not offer delivery to the home. So we have P.O. Boxes and the package delivery services such as DHL or FedEx might try to delivery to a street address.

Typical addressing might go something like this:

Iggy
P.O. Box 123
Grand Cayman KY1-1234
CAYMAN ISLANDS

or for a street address

Iggy
12 Main St
George Town
Grand Cayman
CAYMAN ISLANDS

Of note, postal codes are a recent invention. Only in the last few years. The postal code starts with KY1, KY2, or KY3 which determines which of our three islands the address refers to. The last four digits code which specific post office the P.O. Box is located. So for postal addresses there is no need to state which town the address is located. However the island name is given even though that is coded into the postal code.

For street addressing the town is needed, even though we do not duplicate road names (with a very few exceptions).

Unfortunately many island residents are not familiar with addressing conventions and may give an address of 12 Main St when they really live in Apartment #12 in some unknown building on Little Lane, which is itself off of Side Street which comes off Main St. This provides plenty of opportunity for confusion so best to just put the recipient’s phone number on the package too so they can be called to come to the office to pick up an item.

22

A couple of interesting examples.

CHINA
Following the same principle as family name preceding given name, street addresses are written with largest geographic entity first, addressee’s name last. But this doesn’t apply if you address a letter in English & pinyin.

COSTA RICA
Most of the country doesn’t really have street addresses. It’s common to write an address as something like 200 meters west of Macdonalds, opposite the school football field. Unsurprisingly, the mail service is inefficient and corrupt. The country is a strange mix of backward in some areas, highly advanced in others - most of the country seems to have better cell service than the U.S. I think they should forget about trying to get people to use street grids and go straight to using GPS coordinates.

23

Just for completeness sake, the comma goes between city and state.

Disney Headquarters
101 Happy Lane
Los Angeles, California 90210
Att: Mickey Mouse

If use an ATTN: I always write it on the bottom edge of the envelope, away from the address. That’s generally for internal use (once it gets to where it’s going), not for Post Office use.

I would re-write your address like this:

Mickey Mouse
Disney Headquarters
101 Happy Lane
Los Angeles, California 90210

24

Re New Zealand: I posted the above in good faith; but have just happened to notice the envelope which held a Christmas card to me, from a cousin in NZ. The “sender’s address” on the back of the envelope runs:

House number and street
City name
NZ [four-figure numerical code]

I’m sure the “code” part is new – but it appears that in this matter, the Kiwis have fallen into line with more-or-less the rest of the developed world.

25

It’s the same in Costa Rica (does anybody know if el higuerón, the big fig tree, is still used as a reference in San José? It only got chopped down some 40 years ago). I went to the doctor once, and the doctor, the lab and the pharmacy all shared the same front gate… but gave their adresses differently. Anyone who knew the area would understand that “West of the mango tree” (which grew in the middle of a street, and I mean in the middle), “250m north of Banco Pichincha” (actually not North by the compass, but parallel to the so-called north direction of the Panamericana) and “250m north of the pizzeria” (which was across the street from Banco Pichincha) were the same… but get a computer program to understand any of them!

My area of Spain often gets placenames written in the form NameinSpanish/NameinBasque or viceversa, if it’s for the Post Office. If it’s for anything else, we need to pick the version that GPS assign to our chunk of the street. Apparently their databases just aren’t prepared for bilingualism; if I give my adress in Spanish people end up in front of the Casa de Cultura/Kulturetxea, phoning me to say they can’t find number 6.

26

The person’s name is the first line. Each apartment within the building will have its own number so eg

John Smith
Flat 12
Riverside Building
Underwater Road
Floodtown
FL13 5QX

27

City addesses in Thailand resemble U.S. addresses, but rural addresses in Thailand have no street name: House_# Village_# / Subdistrict / District / Province / Zipcode. How about rural addresses in other countries? Do they have street names?

(Street names may be impossible here because rural streets don’t have names! For more than 20 years I’ve lived on a long major road connecting a dozen villages and providing access to dozens more but when I made inquiries long ago about the road’s name I was met with blank stares. “We don’t talk that way; we just say we’re going to such-and-such village.”)

28

Official Postal Service style calls for no punctuation anywhere in the address and also calls for all capitals.

But we aren’t required to use official style. I always spell out the state name and I use punctuation. I hate the two-letter abbreviations.

29

Me too. I never abbreviate the street name either.

30

It seems rather clear to me why a mail delivery service would seek standardization, and why it would be sensible to overcome one’s animosity to those newfangled two-letter state abbreviations to cooperate. But what do I know, where I grew up the Queen was in charge of the post office.

31

Since the OP is asking about personal experiences, let’s move this to IMHO.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

32

Back in the UK, all mail is mechanically scanned, and it’s the postcode that sends it to the nearest sorting office to the recipient. After that it is sorted by the posties and hand delivered to our front door letterboxes. One of our Christmas cards this year had our correct name and postcode, but the wrong (non existent) street. It found us somehow.

Delivery drivers depend on postcodes for their satnavs to find the address. The street number and postcode will take them to the door. This is not perfect though - as a truck driver, I sometimes found myself at the front door of some large organisation, while deliveries were taken some distance away.

33

They’re not newfangled from my perspective. They’ve been around since as long as I can remember.

But they are clearly unnecessary, particularly given that we use a zip code.

Furthermore, two-letter abbreviations create a greater opportunity for error and ambiguity than full state names.

And not using them clearly doesn’t interfere with mail delivery.

Given all that, plus the fact that they’re aesthetically ugly, I feel no need to conform.

34

Like Guatemala and Costa Rica mentioned above, Panama doesn’t really have street addresses. There is no home mail delivery, so people receive their mail at a post office box. The government mail service is unreliable so businesses rely on courier services for delivery of anything important.

It can be a hassle trying to figure out where a business is. The yellow pages may show a map, or say something like “50 meters past the MacDonald’s on 50th Street.” But most apartment buildings and commercial centers have names that taxi drivers may know. Even street names are not well established. The name that everyone calls a street may be different from the official name on a map. Taxi drivers may not know the official name of even major streets.

If I call a dispatch taxi, I give the name of my building and the two streets that form the intersection (although I give the name of the cross street as “48th Street” instead of its map name of Avenida 3ra Sur, which I have never heard anyone use). But the easiest way to make sure the taxi driver finds it is to give directions with reference to nearby landmarks, including the Comptroller’s Office, Habibi’s Restaurant, and Mundo de Los Globos (Balloon World, a party supply store).

35

When I lived in Chile, the only difference was the street name came before the house number, which I think is the case in nearly all countries:

Name
Magallanes 728
Quintero

In Leon, Nicaragua, there were no street names nor addresses. There would be an address like “Two blocks west, one block north, of the San Leandro Church”, and the postman knew everyone. If he didn’t know, he would go two blocks west and one north of the San Leandro Church and ask around.

In Amman, Jordan, in the 1970s, there were no addresses nor street names, and in general, people did not get private mail delivery. If one needed to receive something by mail, he would have it sent to a nearby shop or business known to the post office, and it would be delivered to the business or to its PO box. The private person would just go around to the place of business and ask if any mail had come for him. Businesses knew that this was the widely-used custom, and in effect, every business became a de-factco postal substation.

When I lived in St. Anselm, New Brunswick, Canada, my road had a name, but it was of no postal relevance. If my house had a number, I never knew what it was. My address was simply Saint-Anselme, Nouveau Brunswick, and it went to a lady’s house, who was the designated “post office”. All mail for the village went to her house, and residents stopped by every day on the way home from work to ask if there was any mail for them.

All of the above have probably changed since then – I think now virtually every country has at least postal codes.

36

In much of the US, the ZIP+4 uniquely identifies the postal route. I have a friend who started just writing

John Jones
12345-6789

on his letters, and they were mostly delivered on time. (The local poasman knowing which house John Jones lived in.)

I have a friend who was a Chinese woman at a major university in Japan. She once received a letter addressed to

Her Full Name
Japan

It took a while to find her, but it DID find her.

37

For all intents and purposes, in the US and UK, you could give the street address and the post code/zip code and very accurately get your letter where you wanted it to go.

I.e. putting in “10927 Sharpview 77072-3007” gets you where you’re going - the 77072 denotes part of Houston, TX, and the “-3007” specifies the street addresses between 10903 and 10931 (7 houses). Adding the “Houston, TX” is kind of redundant, as the sorting equipment at the USPS will sort it down to the delivery person’s flat, and all they have to do is look whether it’s 10927, 10923 or one of the other 5.

Same thing with the MN1 2AB- it gets awfully granular as well.

38

Very topical! :slight_smile:

39

I know that the US system uses machine reading; there is manual backup of course, and you can’t really claim that something “doesn’t interfere with mail delivery” just because mail still arrives. It may be taking up unnecessary resources.

If there is machine reading of zip codes, an obvious reason for an easily-read two digit state abbreviation is that it gives an error check against the zip, where’ you’d flag anything that didn’t match for manual intervention.

Even if everything is manual, a standard format surely makes life easier for a postal worker scanning through masses of mail.

It does not strike me as something where a desire to assert my Freedom outweighs trying to help out the post office by cooperating, even if I’m not worried about getting my mail delivered quickly and accurately.

40

Hehe. That gives me and idea for a test. I know I am the only person with my name in Sweden, so next time I am abroad I am going to try exactly that. Or maybe get my parents to post something.