I am looking at this and thinking of the systems we build (in software) and what we can learn from the sublime postal system.
What is the minimal possible UK address?
21–30 of 406 posts
Re: What is the minimal possible UK address?
#22Reminds me of this wonderful post, primarily UK oriented. Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses
https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...
Re: What is the minimal possible UK address?
#23I think he implied it but there are postal codes that refer to a single Mail Drop location. For example, sometimes your tax return will have its own zip code in the USA.
Any mail addressed to members of ships' crews on vessels transiting the Detroit River can be delivered to them via J. W. Westcott II by being addressed "Vessel Name, Marine Post Office, Detroit, Michigan, 48222." (wikipedia)
Re: What is the minimal possible UK address?
#24Re: What is the minimal possible UK address?
#25Years ago I was told that in Canada house number + postal code was sufficiently unique to deliver mail. This made sense to me in a design, it drastically cuts the amount of information that needs to be read off the envelope.
Then I bought a house that shares a postal code and number with a house on the street behind.
It’s had me wondering what the minimum viable address for any address in the country would be.
Re: What is the minimal possible UK address?
#26I wonder if there are performance differences/overheads between the address styles?
Maybe automated sorting machines use redundant information for OCR error-correction, and omitting it might kick the letter into a fallback "manual processing" queue as the automation has no way of checking the validity of its guess?
Re: What is the minimal possible UK address?
#27In terms of buildings/mail unit, an example of a post code in the UK would be CB2 1TQ which is for Trinity College.
Re: What is the minimal possible UK address?
#28I know that many constituent colleges at the University of Cambridge are the only address in their post code. For example, Trinity College is CB2 1TQ.
However, hundreds of people live in each college (they just have large mailrooms), so on a practical level you’d likely need to put your name down if you wanted to get mail.
Re: What is the minimal possible UK address?
#29Postcodes in Poland are much less granular than the UK ones, but you can still get by in more rural areas on the assumption of local postmen knowing the people. My parents used to routinely successfully receive letters addressed just
where the town has circa 3K inhabitants.
Re: What is the minimal possible UK address?
#30It looks like it went through the automated letter sorter, too (see the orange barcode that's been added to the envelope). Not surprising as the address is even more unambiguous to a machine than a human.
Occasionally there are viral stories here of letters being addressed to places like "The blue house, Termonfeckin, Ireland", which looks like it conveys less information even if it's physically longer. These get manually sorted, though.