Just recently I ordered something from the Netherlands for delivery to Canada, and the address input form did not have a place to put in a province. I put in everything else, including my postal code, and today I received a packet from them. The address label looks like:
My Name
Street Number and Name
<blank line>
City
Canada <postal code>
But it got to me! I suspect that if the postal code was missing, it wouldn’t have.
I just tried to order something (it cost all of $6 for a downloadable publication) and the only payment option was PayPal and I do not have–and do not want–a PayPal account. They do offer payment by credit card, but it was impossible to give a Canadian province as the address on the credit card. Or to omit the field.
I’m sure the reason that Nunavit and NW Territories share the same initial letter on their codes is that the codes were assigned long before Nunavit split off from the Territories. I assume that Yukon has its own (perhaps Y). There is one other Canadian postal code: H0H0H0. Any guesses as to what that is for?
It seems to me that when I was in Switzerland, we did use both city and a two letter abbreviation for the canton on mail. I remember my address was 8032 Zurich, ZH. Of course, the 8032 should have sufficed.
The PayPal issue has come up before, ususLly in discussions about renewing SDMB subscriptions from Canada.
Weirdly, it seems to depend on what browser you’re using. A while ago I couldn’t find aCanadian entry for credit card purchases on PayPal using Safari, but if I switched to Firefox I could. Weird.
Thanks, all! I think my question was thoroughly answered.
For what it’s worth, I’m not going to be putting a dropdown on the site for states/provinces. It’s just a feature available for admin access.
Wow, so there’s only 27 countries on that list. Doesn’t seem to be a real pattern, either - they range from the US to Malaysia to the Sudan. I think that actually helps me form my initial question - what countries are federations? Thanks for the link!
That guide is EXTENSIVE!! Great resource, thanks.
Wow that guy is super compulsive about postal addresses and I’m here for it. Thanks 
The question of whether a country is a federation, or has regional governments that have more autonomy, is largely irrelevant to your problem. How much autonomy a region has and whether the region name is an essential or desirable element in a postal address are independent questions.
Im my experience, Ireland (that is, the Republic) doesn’t have postcodes or zipcodes and the address must include the county. And to UDS’s point, the counties of Ireland are not quasi-sovereign like the U.S. or Australian States, the Canadian Provinces, or the German Lander.
I don’t have a problem to solve, I was just curious and didn’t know how to phrase my question.
Within the US, most states are divided into counties each of which has at least some level of government. Vermont is divided into counties, but there is NO functional county government. The court system is organized by county, and there are a number of quasi-governmental things (solid-waste management districts, etc.) that are largely set up along county boundaries, but no actual county government. We pay taxes to the towns and to the state, but not to counties.
Not quite what the OP was asking for, but…
Yep- for me, the 7 gets the Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana and Oklahoma region, the 52 indicates Dallas, and the 43 indicates the actual sub-region within Dallas. I suppose it indicates which particular post office my mail is delivered from, but I’m not sure.
If I put the +4 on, it narrows us down to a handful of houses on one side of my street.
So in theory, I could put the street address and the zip +4 and that would be all that’s needed to get a letter to me.
That’s also true in Connecticut, Rhode Island and parts of Massachusetts; no county government.
BTW, in the US, there are many town and city names that are duplicated in other states. Is that true elsewhere? Or are municipality names unique at a national level?
Simply speaking (because there are exceptions), ZIP+4 (9 digits) encodes* one side of one block.*
There are 2 additional digits encoded in most printed barcodes, called DPT (Delivery Point), which narrows the address down to a single house (again, there are exceptions for office buildings, high-rises, etc.). Typically, these 2 digits are the last 2 of a street address.
7xxxx indicates the region of the country.
75xxx indicates central Texas.
752xx indicates the Sectional Center Facility for a portion of the state.
Most SCFs serve several counties, but Dallas is so big that it has 4 SCFs.
750xx is northern Dallas.
751xx is southern Dallas.
752xx is Dallas “Main 1”.
753xx is Dallas “Main 2”.
For rural areas and small towns, the 5th digit narrows it down to a single municipality. If a town is large enough to need multiple zip codes, a post office may serve several zip codes. Often, PO boxes will have one zip code, while street addresses will have a different zip code.
My old eyes scan the index in my old Guia Roji (Road Atlas) and see many duplicate names in varied Mexican states. These are both municipios (counties) and ciudades (cities), similar to duplicate Lincoln towns and counties across the US. I’ve not shipped to Mexico for a few years so memory is dim but IIRC state names and mail codes were needed.
Someone else has already answered for Mexico. This is also true for European countries. As examples, look up Neustadt on Wikipedia and see all the places named that in Germany, or Sutton in the UK. Some of these duplicates have additional things added to their names to distinguish, but for others you have to add the name of the state, province, county, or whatever.
And for the US, there’s actually many duplications within states and even within counties*, but at most one per state will have a post office or be incorporated under that name.
Japan wants the prefecture in the address but can also handle it from just the postal code. I would put the prefecture in the address just to make sure.
India uses a 6 digit pin code to identify the location, not sure how precisely, but definitely way below city level. The state is irrelevant.
On the other hand, you have the tiny island nation of Nauru, which has only 11,200 citizens spread across 14 administrative districts, all of which share the same postal code. Kind of defeats the purpose of having a post code, no? My guess is that the Nauru postal administration decided to invent a dummy post code so that citizens would have something to type in the “post code” field of poorly engineered online forms (i.e., ones that make it a required field).
The system you are using may not be very good.
I just tried adding a new address in India, to my Amazon account (just click manage my address book) and Amazon has a drop down list of Indian States/Union Territories.
Ireland changed in 2015 :- we now have Eircode, a system of mapping 7 character codes to the geographical location of every address in the state. (If you type an Eircode into Google maps, it brings you directly to the relevant site, down to house level precision).
In theory all an Irish postal delivery needs is the addressee and the Eircode, although you are recommended to still use the full address so the automated sorting equipment can recognize it.
The description for Australia is slightly misleading: mail is presorted and delivered to a “delivery point number” (which is a secret you have to pay for), so in practice it makes no difference at all what the envelope says other than the house number (the postman won’t look at the street/suburb/state/country name).
Coming from out-of-country, you might not have paid a delivery firm to look up the delivery point number, so it’s the post office artificial-intelligence software that is addressing the envelope. And the post office AI looks mostly at the street name, then state and suburb. The postcode is only for hand-written envelopes. So what you mostly want is to get the information in the right order and location on the envelope, so it doesn’t mix up something like a state and a street name. And since it’s AI, if it mis-interprets the abbreviation you’ve used for court or crescent, it doesn’t matter what the street or state or suburb or postcode is: it’s going somewhere else.