The Duke of Wellington's address, Apsley House, was famously:
1, London
Funny story: Back in the 1950s, my father went on a rugby tour to the Soviet Union. One of his team mates wrote a postcard back to his mum with an address of:
Mrs Williams,
Clynderwen
"Clynderwen" being the little village he came from. My dad said, "You can't just put that". He, none too bright, said "Why not? There's only one Clynderwen", and posted it.
6 months later, and about 5 1/2 after the end of the tour, it arrived. All over it were notes saying things like "Unknown in Hong Kong. Try Australia".
> 6 months later, and about 5 1/2 after the end of the tour, it arrived. All over it were notes saying things like "Unknown in Hong Kong. Try Australia".
Man, that's some serious organizational ethic! If only both companies and people were as exact today...
Also in Sweden, before the invention of postal codes the shortest address was "Bo i Bo". There was a person named Bo living in a village named Bo, and "i" is Swedish for "in".
I mentioned in the other thread about Costa Rican addresses that I met the Vatican priest/Latin grammarian/Latin magazine editor Cleto Pavanetto (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleto_Pavanetto) around 2008 at a spoken Latin event. (Latin was the only language we had in common!)
He told me that he could get successfully receive mail addressed to
I spent the first couple years of my life in a small town in Ireland. Small enough that the houses had names, not numbers — my parents were Tolkien fans, and ours became "Lorien".
I'm told that letters were addressed simply, "Lorien, [town name]"
I’d often send postcards to “Grandma, 14130 [Village name]”. Based on my signature, the mailman would know which grandma to distribute it too. That’s what belonging to a land is like. Our kids probably won’t be able to say which country we are from.
For her whole life, my grandma would receive any mail sent to her full name and zip code. Since it was a small town and everyone at the post office knew her.
My wife grew up in a small town. I met her in university and before the summer break I asked for her address to write to her (this was in the 90s and although I had email by then, she didn't). She assured me that her first name and the town was enough, since all the mail for the town went to the shop across the road from her house and everyone knew her.
KTH's official address is just KTH, 100 44 Stockholm. But since the '10' prefix already implies Stockholm [1], you could feasibly shorten it to just '100 44'.
Actually, it looks like Chalmers is the same way - the address in the footer of their website is just "Chalmers University of Technology, 412 96 Gothenburg" (with the '41' prefix already implying Gothenburg).
Not that I send many paper letters any more, but long ago I took to simply writing my return address as my (unique) last name and zip code which has worked a few times (not that I’d know of any failure cases).
For US post office boxes you can just write the full 9-digit zip code.
Petra Kindler and Donal Moore
Unfortunately I forgot the street name
but it's near a street named *Cul de Sac*
The beautiful city of Waterford,
well known for its kindly postmen
IRELAND
Saw someone on a canal forum in the UK recently who documented how they'd received a letter addressed simply [Name of Boat] [Name of town they were in a few weeks earlier ] via a combination of a postman and a boater who knew which direction they were headed in.
Just as well their boat wasn't called Kingfisher or Meander...
I personally received a letter to:
"Fergal Reid, Longford, Ireland", in the late 90s. Ireland had no postcodes at the time.
I lived in a small village on the edge of a county called Longford; my name isn't that unique in Ireland.
The funny thing about the story, is that the letter was posted in the Philippines, and was physical spam mail, trying to hook me into some sort of scam. They had pulled the partial address from a domain name record. No idea how the economics of that worked!
There's also the fun story of the letter addressed via a map, to "a horse farm with an icelandic/danish couple and 3 kids and a lot of sheep!" - https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-37233913
Mate of mine used to have conversations with the postman on postcards that while while they were addressed to us ALL the text was directed towards the postman.
It's been over 30 years. But they'd read something like;
"Hi Mr.Postman, hope you're having a good day. The weather here is quite lovely. I've been drinking quite a bit. How's your rounds going? Hope it hasn't been raining too bad? Have you broken in the new boots yet? I hear you're getting new bicycles?"
Then the answers would be written in tiny writing in between the questions.
Since Ireland got what we're calling eircodes (post codes for Ireland) we can now have a house level address in 7 chars. So mine is Xxx XXxx I really must try and send myself something with JUST that on the label?! With a wee apology on the back for taking the piss.
In the US, someone I know who had a Post Office box liked writing simply `box-number zip-code` as their address.
It worked. Eg, if you wrote on an envelope:
1034
21240
It would get there! You might want to add a "Box" before the "1034" to be safe -- and to disambiguate between a house number, as in OP? (I'm not sure just a house number would ever work in the USA?)
But it looks cooler with just two numbers. Especially it did 20 years ago when my friend did it. Very futuristic cyberpunk. Maybe a square glyph for "box" would be good.
This is true. As others have pointed out, all PO Boxes can be appended to a 5 digit zip to get to the box (e.g. ZIP-BOX#) No city or state should be needed (zip covers that), nor name (not needed for mail in general, but might cause other issues).
The US Postal System actually uses a full 11 digit number to identify a "Delivery Point". The "+4" after a zip code is basically a subroute within that zip code, but there are two numbers after that you don't really see that will identify the full delivery point, which is basically a mailbox. The USPS tracks a number of things at this delivery point level, including whether a secondary address is needed, if they are currently delivering to that address, or if service is temporarily suspended (potentially due to a natural disaster or road outage in the case of a more remote rural address).
I'd really love to see if just a full 11 digit number is enough to get mail delivered to my house. I guess I could try, as it's easier than you'd think to find out your code
In many cases, the PO box number becomes the suffix of ZIP+4 so you could probably write 21240-1084. I have friends use this nine digit number as their return address.
Note: the real barcodes use 11 digits. There are two extra digits beyond the Zip+4 that encode the stop along the route. The Zip+4 gets you to the block but then you need two more digits to specify the house/apartment etc. If you can decide the barcodes sprayed on the front of the envelope by the USPS, you'll find the extra two digits. But the Zip+4 that everyone knows isn't that precise.
My ZIP+4 describes exactly three houses - we're all on one side of one given block. I'm trying to figure out the minimum amount of info the delivery person would need to find my house among the other two.
Is it cheating if I put a photo of the house on the envelope?
I was excited to learn PO box numbers are unique in my city and have their own ZIP code so theoretically mail could reach me with an address of only "37939-0002" (ZIP only) or "PO Box 2, Knoxville" (no ZIP) if someone wants to test it out. I'll send something fun in reply.
No state either? Would they know which state to route that to? I think yours is the largest but apparently there are a bunch of cities in the US with that name.
I can confirm that "<Room Number> New York New York, Las Vegas, Nevada 89109" doesn't work. They wanted the actual street address of the hotel. Which surprised me, as I'm used to big hotels being well-known enough that you can just write a room number, hotel name and city and have it arrive in the right place.
As noted above, ZIP+4 uniquely identifies most (all?) US PO Boxes, so theoretically provides everything the post office needs to make the delivery.
For what it's worth, I've personally mailed an envelope addressed only to my PO Box ZIP+4 with no return address, and it worked.
Note, however, that abbreviated "addresses" of this type violate USPS's published guidelines, so they may be rejected by automated mail sorting systems and therefore delayed, or, especially in cases where discounted bulk rates apply, rejected altogether.
At my college dorm I was able to receive mail sent to:
Room number
9-digit zip
Like
219
65432-9876
It may have helped that all mail to that 5-digit zip went to the school, and its mail room people might have had more time on their hands than the USPS.
I worked with someone who painted and mailed a bunch of bagels. As in the bagels you toast and eat. As in a stamp stuck onto a painted bagel with the address written with marker. They all got to their destinations.
Its potentially possible for individuals/orgs too.
The post office standard mentions something to the effect "If a firm name is assigned a unique ZIP+4 then it must be used" (rather than just the zip code).
Which implies its possible for a "firm" to get their own zip+4 number and that by itself is probably sufficient for the automated mailing system to identify the recipient.
The ZIP+4 is intended to be a redundant checksum against the name+address (which doesn't strictly require a zip code for handwritten/non bulk mail), so presumably a bunch of "hacks" work in the post office system as well.
AKA, for a lot of rural/etc places just a name and a basic zip code probably works/etc.
When I was living in Dubai a decade ago, the PO box numbers were unique across the country, and there is no postal delivery service, so that's the only way to receive post[0]. Usually you'd use your work's PO box for the rare time you get post (typically AliExpress) but I was freelancing so had to rent my own.
My address was simply "12345 UAE" from anywhere in the world. I typically had to add more detail, as address forms would not let me enter only these fields.
[0] Couriers would of course come to your building. Typically the address you gave would include directions "Near Yacht Club" as street names were not always clear.
My family lives in a rural community where most people know everyone's name. So I have successfully sent a postcard to myself across the US with simply my first name and the zip code.
Or post office worker anyway. There isn't actually a "driver" involved, the PO Box is in the post office identified with that zip code, the only driving involved is to get it to that building in the first place!
Not only are their PO Box only zip codes, but there are also zip codes that are associated with various business and government entities. In those cases the USPS literally doesn't care what you put for the address bc they will hand over all the mail addressed to that zip code to the entity and let them handle it.
The most famous example of this is the zip code 12345, which is actually for GE in Schenectady, NY.
I remember working with SagePay as a payment provider back in 2008 (before we knew of Stripe!) and finding it interesting that card address validation was only done on the numbers in a full address.
For example, from "20 Windsor Road, London, SE1 6JH" it would extract 2016 and validate that against the banks details.
I thought that was quite a smart way as UK addresses can come in all forms, shapes and sizes (as the post shows) – but the minimal bits required to be correct are indeed the numbers as all postcodes have them and an incorrect number would mean a incorrect postcode.
Edit: the funny bit was that they made you work this out and send it along with the request rather than just handling it internally :)
I remember CGP Grey talked about staying with his wife's family in rural Hawaii, on his Cortex podcast. His address included something like "take a left at the big tree".
The additional complication was that the USPS wouldn't deliver to the house, so they got a PO box, which is common in rural areas. But the USPS won't allow private carriers to deliver to PO boxes. So you need to use a different address depending on which carrier is taking the package. A lot of stores (Amazon!) won't tell you which carrier they're going to use!
So he would see packages slowly make their way to his island, then be marked as undeliverable, then slowly make their way back. Eventually Amazon stopped allowing him to ship packages at all.
At least for the neighboring country (Nicaragua) it's like that.
Sometimes the reference points are not even there anymore, as in the case of some old buildings destroyed in the Managua earthquake in '72
>The additional complication was that the USPS wouldn't deliver to the house, so they got a PO box, which is common in rural areas. But the USPS won't allow private carriers to deliver to PO boxes. So you need to use a different address depending on which carrier is taking the package. A lot of stores (Amazon!) won't tell you which carrier they're going to use!
Two options:
* Specify both the PO box and street address in the mailing address, like
John Q. Public
PO Box 123
1 Main Street
Anytown USA 00600
This is best for situations where you don't know which carrier the sender will use. People who live in rural areas where they have both a PO box (because USPS won't deliver to their homes) and a valid street address that other carriers do deliver to might use this option.
That's basically what he ended up doing, except that the address and PO box had different ZIP codes. Also any store that does address validation wont allow that.
Another reason why addresses should just be multi-line text boxes.
When we moved into our newly built house, the USPS wasn't quite ready for us and it took a couple months for them to recognize and validate our address. Fedex and UPS had no such problem. We had to order a bunch of stuff off of Amazon, and a couple of those packages were sent back by USPS. I contacted Amazon and they set it so all packages were sent via UPS and Fedex for a while.
Meanwhile, google maps already added all the streets for a new subdivision near me that hasn't even finished grading the terrain yet. It's funny to watch a doordash driver pull down a dead-end street that LOOKS like it ought to connect to mine, and then back out, take a massive detour, and enter my neighborhood from the exact opposite side.
This is a fantastic post & I love mail art and experimenting with the mail. One thing I learned in the USA is that while a card can be 3x5 (LxW) it cannot be 5x3 (i.e. oriented in "portrait") because the machines aren't set up to read it that way. However, you can add $.20 in additional postage and write "No machine" so they hand-cancel the stamp rather than using the machine. This is useful for any time you don't want them running the letter through the cancelling machine.
At the risk of opening myself up to having postal workers kick in my door and charge me with a federal crime: one experiment I tried was to stamp a postcard addressed to me, cover the address with a card with my friends address on it, shrink-wrapping it and sending it to them. The stamp does not get canceled because of the plastic wrap & the reply can travel back to me on the same stamp. (basically: "yes you can cover a stamp with plastic to avoid cancellation then reuse it.")
One nit I'd pick with the author here is that the address style he uses does not adequately route the letter to him. He states that all the mail in his building goes into one box, so if this were not something he was expecting and it arrived for him, there would be no way to route it to the correct person once it reached the building. I suppose in the more general case, assuming a single family household, this method would work. Cool post in any event!
Nonmachinable mail can be all sorts of shapes as well. I've had a lot of fun cutting cardstock into silhouettes and irregular polygons and mailing them.
When I moved, I sent postcards notifying people of my new address in the shape of my new state. US mail is quite flexible thanks to the nonmachinable surcharge.
Yes I should have mentioned that. If you want to send any weird shape or a piece of wood or something (I recently sent some postcards I'd cut from raw veneer/scrap from a sawmill) the no-machine/hand-cancel fee is the ticket.
I'm sure it depends a bit on the delivery and sorting offices involved. The UK (I'm an ex-pat) seems to be WAY better than the US at this - it seems they really want to deliver the mail and make an effort to do so, vs here in the US where it's almost the opposite - like they are looking for any excuse NOT to deliver. I had one returned to sender since the post office wouldn't figure the missing town from the zip code!
I've read stories of letters to rural areas in UK where "so & so, sheepstown" is enough to get it delivered since the carrier knew who so & so was. As a kid in the UK I remember once asking for a refund on a can of hot-dogs that was one short, by sending a note on a greasy chinese take-out lid without even adding a stamp to it. The post office delivered it, and I got my refund!
This Tom Scott video shows some of the surprising (to me) lengths to which the USPS does go to figure out the right address: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxCha4Kez9c Obviously this doesn't apply to your case, but I certainly didn't think they'd have a national center for decoding terrible handwriting.
Interesting, but you'd think that even these OCR fallout cases could be automated by neural net (I'd expect super-human performance on a task like this), especially since they have the training data right there.
It's cool how well integrated this is with the sorting centers where each mail piece actually is, so that the cases they handle essentially flow thru (with a retry attempt) as normal.
I've got to wonder why my piece with missing city but 100% legible otherwise-complete address including ZIP was still returned to sender. Seems it may have been policy for a certain class of mail (this was international registered, with a tracking number printed on it). In this case, to make matters worse, despite having themselves returned it to overseas sender, they then kept on sending me updates on their failure to locate it when I asked them to track it!
A Royal Mail letter posted without a stamp would likely lead to an insufficient postage card being delivered which would require the postage + £1 attaching to it for the letter to be released.
Readit News
Students used to send her postcards from their journeys.
It became so popular that it was enough to write "Olga, Sweden" for her to get the letters [0] (source in swedish).
[0]: https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olga_Boberg
1, London
Funny story: Back in the 1950s, my father went on a rugby tour to the Soviet Union. One of his team mates wrote a postcard back to his mum with an address of:
Mrs Williams,
Clynderwen
"Clynderwen" being the little village he came from. My dad said, "You can't just put that". He, none too bright, said "Why not? There's only one Clynderwen", and posted it.
6 months later, and about 5 1/2 after the end of the tour, it arrived. All over it were notes saying things like "Unknown in Hong Kong. Try Australia".
Man, that's some serious organizational ethic! If only both companies and people were as exact today...
Ill never forget my great aunt amy (my grandmothers sister, they were both canadian by birth in 1923-time)
"Grandma, I didnt know Amy was british!?"
"Neither did we dear, neither did we"
(My great aunt would talk with a British accent)
Family fact - my uncle (Amy's son) went to school with Bill and Paul in Seattle and we have a pic of them together...
No 8.8.8.8 here, try over there ...
He told me that he could get successfully receive mail addressed to
I was pretty impressed!I'm told that letters were addressed simply, "Lorien, [town name]"
Not as impressive as Olga, of course, but close!
Actually, it looks like Chalmers is the same way - the address in the footer of their website is just "Chalmers University of Technology, 412 96 Gothenburg" (with the '41' prefix already implying Gothenburg).
[1] https://www.postnord.se/vara-verktyg/sok-postnummer-och-adre...
For US post office boxes you can just write the full 9-digit zip code.
""Dear God" letters are sent to Mail Recovery offices or local churches."
Although that's also an address with it's own postcode, so "SW1A 2AA" would also get there.
eg
It was successfully and correctly delivered to the Dáil (the lower house of the Irish parliament).
ETA: source —- https://www.her.ie/amp/lol/unbelievable-this-letter-made-it-...
[1] https://www.thegobshites.com/
Just as well their boat wasn't called Kingfisher or Meander...
The most notable example was addressed to "correct name, house number (no street), wrong city entirely". It arrived two days late, unopened.
I like to imagine there's a little old lady sat in a sorting office somewhere, who simply knows everyone's business. Everyone's.
I lived in a small village on the edge of a county called Longford; my name isn't that unique in Ireland.
The funny thing about the story, is that the letter was posted in the Philippines, and was physical spam mail, trying to hook me into some sort of scam. They had pulled the partial address from a domain name record. No idea how the economics of that worked!
https://www.meversusanpost.com/
Since Ireland got what we're calling eircodes (post codes for Ireland) we can now have a house level address in 7 chars. So mine is Xxx XXxx I really must try and send myself something with JUST that on the label?! With a wee apology on the back for taking the piss.
Deleted Comment
It worked. Eg, if you wrote on an envelope:
It would get there! You might want to add a "Box" before the "1034" to be safe -- and to disambiguate between a house number, as in OP? (I'm not sure just a house number would ever work in the USA?)But it looks cooler with just two numbers. Especially it did 20 years ago when my friend did it. Very futuristic cyberpunk. Maybe a square glyph for "box" would be good.
The US Postal System actually uses a full 11 digit number to identify a "Delivery Point". The "+4" after a zip code is basically a subroute within that zip code, but there are two numbers after that you don't really see that will identify the full delivery point, which is basically a mailbox. The USPS tracks a number of things at this delivery point level, including whether a secondary address is needed, if they are currently delivering to that address, or if service is temporarily suspended (potentially due to a natural disaster or road outage in the case of a more remote rural address).
I'd really love to see if just a full 11 digit number is enough to get mail delivered to my house. I guess I could try, as it's easier than you'd think to find out your code
PO 1234 NY, NY 10010
Note: the real barcodes use 11 digits. There are two extra digits beyond the Zip+4 that encode the stop along the route. The Zip+4 gets you to the block but then you need two more digits to specify the house/apartment etc. If you can decide the barcodes sprayed on the front of the envelope by the USPS, you'll find the extra two digits. But the Zip+4 that everyone knows isn't that precise.
Is it cheating if I put a photo of the house on the envelope?
For what it's worth, I've personally mailed an envelope addressed only to my PO Box ZIP+4 with no return address, and it worked.
Note, however, that abbreviated "addresses" of this type violate USPS's published guidelines, so they may be rejected by automated mail sorting systems and therefore delayed, or, especially in cases where discounted bulk rates apply, rejected altogether.
In other words, YMMV.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/you-can-mail-coconut-a...
The post office standard mentions something to the effect "If a firm name is assigned a unique ZIP+4 then it must be used" (rather than just the zip code).
Which implies its possible for a "firm" to get their own zip+4 number and that by itself is probably sufficient for the automated mailing system to identify the recipient.
The ZIP+4 is intended to be a redundant checksum against the name+address (which doesn't strictly require a zip code for handwritten/non bulk mail), so presumably a bunch of "hacks" work in the post office system as well.
AKA, for a lot of rural/etc places just a name and a basic zip code probably works/etc.
My address was simply "12345 UAE" from anywhere in the world. I typically had to add more detail, as address forms would not let me enter only these fields.
[0] Couriers would of course come to your building. Typically the address you gave would include directions "Near Yacht Club" as street names were not always clear.
The most famous example of this is the zip code 12345, which is actually for GE in Schenectady, NY.
Deleted Comment
For example, from "20 Windsor Road, London, SE1 6JH" it would extract 2016 and validate that against the banks details.
I thought that was quite a smart way as UK addresses can come in all forms, shapes and sizes (as the post shows) – but the minimal bits required to be correct are indeed the numbers as all postcodes have them and an incorrect number would mean a incorrect postcode.
Edit: the funny bit was that they made you work this out and send it along with the request rather than just handling it internally :)
"I am sure some postcodes only contain one house number, in which case you could use just the postcode as your address, which would be quite cool. "
Indeed.
There are 55,540 full postcodes in England and Wales that contain only one household.
This would mean you could just send the letter to the postcode itself.
Source: https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/fre...
For example, if you want to write to HMRC about your self-assessment the address is: BX9 1AS, and that's it.
Edit: moreover, BX is the non-geographic code, whereas 'normal' postcode start with a geographic code, which is usually an abbreviation of the town.
The additional complication was that the USPS wouldn't deliver to the house, so they got a PO box, which is common in rural areas. But the USPS won't allow private carriers to deliver to PO boxes. So you need to use a different address depending on which carrier is taking the package. A lot of stores (Amazon!) won't tell you which carrier they're going to use!
So he would see packages slowly make their way to his island, then be marked as undeliverable, then slowly make their way back. Eventually Amazon stopped allowing him to ship packages at all.
https://www.crcdaily.com/p/why-doesnt-costa-rica-use-real-ad...
Two options:
* Specify both the PO box and street address in the mailing address, like
John Q. Public
PO Box 123
1 Main Street
Anytown USA 00600
This is best for situations where you don't know which carrier the sender will use. People who live in rural areas where they have both a PO box (because USPS won't deliver to their homes) and a valid street address that other carriers do deliver to might use this option.
* USPS PO boxes can receive from other carriers, if street addressing is used. <https://www.usps.com/manage/po-boxes.htm#streetaddress>
Another reason why addresses should just be multi-line text boxes.
At the risk of opening myself up to having postal workers kick in my door and charge me with a federal crime: one experiment I tried was to stamp a postcard addressed to me, cover the address with a card with my friends address on it, shrink-wrapping it and sending it to them. The stamp does not get canceled because of the plastic wrap & the reply can travel back to me on the same stamp. (basically: "yes you can cover a stamp with plastic to avoid cancellation then reuse it.")
One nit I'd pick with the author here is that the address style he uses does not adequately route the letter to him. He states that all the mail in his building goes into one box, so if this were not something he was expecting and it arrived for him, there would be no way to route it to the correct person once it reached the building. I suppose in the more general case, assuming a single family household, this method would work. Cool post in any event!
This is without a doubt the most useless bit of information I've gotten in more than a decade and I cannot wait to try it out. Awesome and thank you.
When I moved, I sent postcards notifying people of my new address in the shape of my new state. US mail is quite flexible thanks to the nonmachinable surcharge.
I've read stories of letters to rural areas in UK where "so & so, sheepstown" is enough to get it delivered since the carrier knew who so & so was. As a kid in the UK I remember once asking for a refund on a can of hot-dogs that was one short, by sending a note on a greasy chinese take-out lid without even adding a stamp to it. The post office delivered it, and I got my refund!
Well, here in the UK the norm (for non-commercial mail) is not to include a return address on the outside of the envelope.
To return something to the sender, they have to open it and hope they find an address inside. Much easier to just deliver it!
Huh? I was always taught to put your address on the back.
It's cool how well integrated this is with the sorting centers where each mail piece actually is, so that the cases they handle essentially flow thru (with a retry attempt) as normal.
I've got to wonder why my piece with missing city but 100% legible otherwise-complete address including ZIP was still returned to sender. Seems it may have been policy for a certain class of mail (this was international registered, with a tracking number printed on it). In this case, to make matters worse, despite having themselves returned it to overseas sender, they then kept on sending me updates on their failure to locate it when I asked them to track it!