The lovely thing about email is that it works no matter where you are. Email addresses are tied to people, not locations. This makes your email address a convenient globally-unique identifier, since it follows you even if you move across the country.
It's high time that snail mail addresses worked the same way. When you send a letter or a package, you're sending it to a person, not a location. You don't care where it goes, you just care that it makes it into the hands of the intended recipient. Street addresses are great when you're giving someone directions to a party, but they're suboptimal when used as mailing addresses.
As someone who tends to move about once a year on average, I've begun to dread changing my address in a hundred different places almost as much as I dread packing and lifting furniture. I invariably forget to update it somewhere important, the USPS invariably continues to deliver the occasional important piece of mail to my old address instead of forwarding it to the new address, and by the time I've finally got everything sorted out, I've moved again.
What I want is a single, unchanging, globally unique identifier that will serve as a pointer to my current physical address. It would rock if I could use my email address or even OpenID for this. The USPS would maintain a central database mapping unique IDs to street addresses and would provide a simple REST API to allow authorized consumers (such as UPS, FedEx, etc.) to retrieve the current street address for any given ID.
Never again would I have to update my address in a million different places. I'd just log into usps.com, change my address there, and all my mail would be delivered to the new address automatically from that point forward. In addition to making things more convenient for me, this would also save the postal service huge amounts of time and money by eliminating the need for temporary change-of-address forwarding and drastically reducing the amount of misdelivered mail that gets returned to sender.
Why hasn't this been done already?
Comments
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Tom Coates of Plasticbag briefly mentioned something like this in a post last year. It seems like the next logical step in addressing, kind of like logical and physical addressing/naming of servers in a network.
use a mail forwarder
Ryan use a mail forwarding service. They are used by RV'ers and Voyagers, and no doubt others. I don't think they are very expensive, and it would save you having to change it.
great idea
That is really a great idea, this should be seriously done!
Earth Class Mail
As Matt suggested, there are mail forwarders out there...most of them are aimed at RV'ers and the homeless by choice, but I'm sure they'd be happy to help you...
Earth Class Mail passes the basic smell test and offers what looks like a decent pricing scheme...I don't know what your mail volume is like, of course, but they offer to "toss the trash" before sending it onto you...I would say that I probably RTS 99% of the mail I get and trash about 50% of the 1% that does survive because it's bulk rate and you can't RTS bulk rate.
It's not the ideal solution you look for (which would be awesome), because you do have to pay for the basic service and the forwarded shipments, but it would solve your problem...they do offer a "scan to PDF" option that would allow you to not have to physically receive most mail.
Re: Earth Class Mail
Earth Class Mail looks pretty cool. $15 a month is kinda expensive though, and it's still not quite what I need. I don't get a ton of mail, so I don't really need help dealing with it; I just need a single constant address that I can give to everyone that will never ever change.
The biggest problem with forwarding services is that they add at least a few days of extra delay. I don't want my Netflix rentals to have to go through a forwarding service to get to me.
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This was really bothering me when I moved a couple years ago too. It really needs to be solved by the USPS though, otherwise you have to deal with a delay for remailing. Also annoying is how ISPs send account info to the email address they provided which I will never use because it is similarly fragile.
International mail?
Sounds like a very nice idea to do, provide you have a single repository for converting this to a real address, that everyone could use. If you get a country's postal service to adopt this, say using an email, you still need a physical reference to the country, since anyone could have a random@example.com email address / OpenID / etc. And you have the problem of a huge central database containing everyone's addresses. It's a mess on several fronts: privacy, security, administrative. I think it's one of the things that sound really good on paper, but far worse once you think about either the theoretical implications or the implementation.
RE: International Mail
I would submit that that it's no more dangerous than a user database on a website. I think the idea is pretty solid...all we really want to be able to send to:
and have it get to me. If I had to give a little more information (say a state of birth, just to distribute the sorting load), that still wouldn't be a hugely non-trivial exercise. I've already built the system in my head. We're already OCR'ing postal mail to ensure routing, why not do a little correlation work and stick a final destination sticker on the box in the sorting office?
Mail forwarders are already doing this, so it's a solid proof-of-concept. I want my Universal Mailing Address.
Once upon a time, when the mail system was smaller, you could just put:
and be reasonably certain it arrived. Knowing my mailing address is no more dangerous to me than knowing my email address. For people who are well-known, it's trivial to get their physical residence.
It's probably not ideal, but I still have a lot of places sending mail to my parents' house. They haven't moved in 10 years. I go out once a month and visit and get my mail. "urgent" stuff gets sent to me via USPS Priority.
International Mail
2 quick things...
With respect to Earth Class Mail, you get to decide to whom you provide your Earth Class Mail address. If you want Netflix to arrive at your residence, you don't need to give them your Earth Class Mail address.
Once you have an ECM address, it's yours in perpetuity. No need to change addresses ever again.
As for the other issues surrounding addressing and deliverability, Canada Post as well as a number of other posts around the world are implementing this unique identifier technique. Don't hold your breathe for the USPS to do it; it's literally takes a committee process and an act of Congress to do something like that.
Re: International Mail
I know I can provide my actual address to Netflix and other high priority senders, but then I'm back to square one, since I still end up having to change my address in a bunch of different places when I move.
Small Towns
It's actually still the case that you only need Name + City if you live in a sufficiently small town.
My mom gets mail with probably 3 different street addresses, plus none at all, all delivered to her single mail box out at the end of her driveway.
I usually just write "Mary Smith, Smalltown, IL 61234" when when sending her something.