Why do we need to write the town and state in the address? Should 123 Main St., 09876 do it?
I always presumed it was just redundancy, in case the zip was illegible/wrong/etc. Same reason they make you write the value of a check once with digits and once longhand.
Exactly. Mail has been safely delivered to me with the wrong address and correct postal code, and with the correct address and wrong postal code. It’s redundancy.
Even though the previous two answers nailed it, I’ll confirm them, just to be redundant 
Technically speaking, you could send me a letter with nothing on it but the ZIP+4, and it should get to my P.O. Box (ZIP+4 codes for PO boxes are unique). But if it was raining when the mail carrier got the envelopes, and a drop of rain caused the ink to run on one of the digits, it would end up in the dead letter office. Add name, town, state, etc., and it can still find its way to me.
Here in rural America, it can get entertaining. My ranch was between two towns. You could pick between rural delivery from one town, or a P.O. Box at the other. Someone mailed me registration papers on some cattle and didn’t realize I had the P.O. Box. He sent the envelope to the wrong town, with the wrong ZIP code and the wrong address. The only thing right on there was the state and my name. I still got it the next day after he mailed it.
A friend lived up in a tiny town in northern NH and we would often send him postcards from our travels with nothing but a ZIP code for the address. Not even ZIP+four, just ZIP and they pretty much were always delivered. The ZIP would get it to the local PO, and they knew that anything out of the ordinary or just plain weird was delivered to Nelson. I think the best was a coconut.
As an experiment once, I mailed something to my parents. All I put on the envelope was:
{last name}
{zip code}
They got it two days later. It helps that they live in a small town.
There’s a similar thing in Canada… if your postal code has a 0 in second place, it’s a small town or rural delivery area. Presumably everyone knows what’s going on sufficiently well to sort things out quickly. I kept meaning to send a postcard as a test: <Last Name> K0L 2L0.
any thoughts from posters regarding a quasi database that the USPS keeps on all address/addressee combinations?
forwarded mail is automatically re-routed and a new sticker is put on, correct? this would suggest that there is, at least for people who use mail forwarding, a database that contains their old address, new address, and name. i can’t see why this isn’t scalable to all people, and maybe this is why people in rural areas can get mail even with many errors on the envelope.
My mom, who lived in the same house for 30+ years, has received mail with her first name only and the wrong address (but correct town/zip). It did take a few days, though.
I think the street name given was close enough that they figured it out after a couple of tries. That’s in a fairly good sized town (around 80K back then IIRC).
It also helped a lot that she’d had the same mailman for years, so if it got anywhere near him, he’d know it.
I donotunderstand people who complain about our mail service.
I frequently put only the street + zipcode as my return address. If I could remember the zip+4, and was sure that it was unique to me, I’d just put that. I’m absolutely positive that I know my own address.
re the mail forwarding…I believe the USPS purges the database fairly quickly. AFAIR, you only get mail forwarded for about 6 weeks or so. Anything after that will just keep going to the wrong address.
Rural addresses get the mail for the same reason Mom did - because someone recognizes their name, even if it’s misspelled. Computers are really, really bad at that sort of “fuzzy” thinking.
The reason they purge (and that it’s not scalable to “everyone”) is just the sheer amount of data. I’m sure it COULD be done, if you wanted to spend a gazillion dollars on it, though.
I’ve told this story before, but I’ll tell it again because it’s so cool. An online acquaintance once told of an ancestor (whose surname was Isserlis) receiving a letter in the early 20th century. It was addressed thus:
ISSERLIS
ENGLAND
We’re rual and still occasionally receive misaddressed mail. Our mailing address used to be Route 1, Box XX, and our fire number was YYYY; now it’s W#### [rural road name], where WXXXX is our newly assigned fire number. We get mail addressed to Route 1, Box XX and to YYYY [rural road name]. It helps that (1) Mr. S has an unusual surname, and his family has lived here for decades, and (2) I use my own name, so anything addressed to MyName at this address is pretty easy to figure out.
There’s also this story of the Royal Mail delivering a letter with only a name and a crudely drawn map.
If it’s a change-of-address request, they actually do it for an entire year free of charge. I think you can pay them to do it even longer.
First class (and I think parcels) --for a year, and we’ve had things forwarded by the Post Office even longer. (Note that there are certain things, including some government checks, that will not be forwarded, per clearly printed instructions on the envelope.) You can request second and third class mail be forwarded – I think second class (periodicals) generally is for a certain peruiod anyway.
Is the
HILL
JOHN
MASS
thing apocryphal?
In addition to the redundancy mentioned above, there is also the historical reasoning. Prior to zip codes, letters were addressed with
Name
Address
City, State
When zip codes were introduced, they were optional, and placed after the state.
I remember as a young lad helping my mother with Christmas cards. My job was to lick the envelopes. On the envelopes destined for friends and relatives living in the same town as us, she addressed the envelopes as:
Uncle Joe and Aunt Flo
3832 S. 47th Street
City
No zip code, no city name or state. This was Tacoma, Washington, a city of about 90,000 folks or so about that time. Some of the cards we received were also addressed the same. She would also send other mail throughout the year using the same style. It wasn’t till the late 60’s that a couple pieces of mail were returned for a better address, the post office would no longer accept “city” for mail destined for the same town in which it was sent.
What was that website where those people tried mailing things in a wide variety of weird packagings?
A lot of stuff got there despite huge rule-breaking.
MAD Magazine had (has?) a running “creative letters” feature in the Letters and Tomatoes Dept.
The whole envelope was a drawing of Alfred E. Neuman and a 10022 in the corner. No other characters. It (obviously) got there.
Hee:
It also depends on the country. In the UK, the Postcode identifies the building itself (so don’t get me started on how come neither BT nor UPS can seem to find half the houses in the country); in Spain, the post office.
My Spanish postcode includes 3 towns, which in turn include three Calle Capuchinos, a Calle Capuchinas, a Callejón de Capuchinos, a Cuesta Capuchinos, a Plaza Capuchinas and a Plaza Capuchinos. Oh, and the province’s capital has a Barrio Capuchinos (and a Calle Capuchinos, and a Callejón Capuchinos, and a Plaza Capuchinos), so more than once letters to my mother have taken a detour to the capital before someone saw it was in the wrong town. On the other hand, I can send letters to a college friend of mine to the tune of:
Ana Herlastname
Village, Province
And they arrive; she actually says it’s better that way than with the postcode and everything (the postcode includes the village and a chunk of the big town nearby). The whole village consists of ten houses and her father’s factory, mind you.