Inspired by Is that all the address they needed back then?, I’m wondering if the USPS would deliver mail with nothing but an 11-digit POSTNET barcode on the front (and a stamp, of course). The barcode translates to your ZIP code, the four extra digits of the ZIP+4 code to narrow the address down further, and two digits of your specific delivery point (plus a check digit). Seems like all they’d need…
Has anyone sent or received mail successfully with this limited information?
The Better Half, 22-year veteran letter carrier, says:
DDG, I’m not sure I understand what your husband said. He was looking at a numeric code that’s human-readable?
The situation in Australia (where I’m a postal worker) is that every address (or ‘delivery point’ as they like to call them) in the country has a unique barcode. This isn’t readable by humans. The capability is therefore not being used to its full extent. So a letter with just a barcode would make it all the way from wherever it was posted, through all the steps involved, and would make it as far as the individual postman’s round (beat), but once he or she has it, there’d be no way of telling which house it was without some sort of handheld scanner (which they don’t have). This last step remains the only manual one for barcoded mail.
POSTNET is meant to be read by machines, but it’s simple enough that a [del]geek[/del] dedicated human can read it.
If the full eleven digit code is on the item, it would be easy enough to say with strong certainty what the address is.
The first five digits are the familiar 5-digit ZIP code, followed by the +4 digits that identify a carrier’s route or delivery point. The last two digits of an 11-digit ZIP are the last two digits of the address.
Delivery points can be quite small - the last apartment building I lived in had three banks of 20 mailboxes in the lobby (one for each floor) and three delivery points, each with their own 9-digit ZIP code. Hypothetically, my ZIP there was 12345-0002-08 as I was in Apartment 208. The +4 part wasn’t 0002, but it was uniquely assigned to the second floor of that building.
Thanks, gotpasswords.
I must admit to being geeky enough to be able to read the previus generation flourescent orange codes by their numerical representations, so I’m not surprised at this. Thanks.
I think what DDG was saying was that since the letter had the barcode, it was sorted correctly, and that happened to be in between two houses which had properly-addressed mail. You could easily compare the last bit of the barcode on the unlabeled piece of mail with the mail for the other two houses. If it matched one of them, there’s your answer. Since it didn’t, you’d trust the sorting machine and deliver it to the house between the other two.
If there was more than one house which didn’t have mail between the other two, that would reduce your certainty as to which one is correct. Usually the last two digits of the barcode correspond to the last two digits of your address (so the carrier could lookup the code for those two digits, and give it to that address), but there are exceptions (I’m one…I live in a house which has been converted to apartments, and we’re all at the same street address (so we’d have to have different delivery point numbers)).
See above.
This is confusing. If your apartment has three banks of 20 mailboxes, it has 60 delivery points. Each addressable, mailable address in America is its own delivery point. You’re saying your apartment had three different ZIP+4 codes, which is different.
P.O. Boxes (usually) have their own individual ZIP+4 codes, making the delivery point number redundant.
Oops… different point. The banks of mailboxes were MSPs, or Managed Service Points.
The USPS has an absurd number of acronyms. It’s amazing that they manage to make sense of them and get the mail delivered.