Matching Addresses Exactly To The Usps Address Database: Fill & Download for Free

The USPS has developed a massive database of all legal U.S. addresses. Each ZIP code is assigned to a brick and mortar USPS Post Office.The United States Postal Service USPS uses optical character recognition OCR to read addresses on letters a packages. Printed addresses are quite easy for OCR to read. Handwritten addresses should have a numeric ZIP code that OCR reads and assigns to a Post Office.ZIP code OCR is particularly easy. There are only 10 distinct digits to match and the ZIP has an exact length (5 or 9 digits). I believe USPS matched only ZIP codes in its early deployment.At the local Post Office, all the letters and packages should all have the same ZIP code. The local office’s sorting machines and postal workers’ skill can determine the complete address to deliver it.Edit: OCR is only used the first time to read the address.Computers can take time to run OCR, even seconds matter when reading millions of letter and packages. OCR is only used the first time to read the address. This address is converted to a barcode and written on the letter or package for later stages to read and sort. (See History link below)Concept: Optical character recognition - WikipediaHistory: Postal Mechanization and Early AutomationDatabase: USPS - Address ManagementFor Programmers: Web Tools APIs | USPS

Sure do. Every letter that passes through gets the address on it compared to the database of actual addresses and if there is no exact match it tries to find one really close.

Ah, quit your whining! You think it is bad now? Larry Niven predicts that someday, even minor crimes such as spitting on the sidewalk will become grounds for being fed into the organ banks. Given that you can get an exact tissue match in two weeks or less out of China, I would guess that they are already well on their way!Okay, the point about being unable to execute it is valid. The world is becoming vastly more incompetent since Windoze 10 was released. I suspect that county governments will have to shut down first. At least ours is having significant problems. The financial system is cracking. Possibly crumbling. Brokerage firms particularly. I have an amusing series of screenshots, informing me that my account balance was an astonishingly wide range of values, but never the correct ones of either $16,000 before I moved the money, or $1,000 after I moved the money.I asked for $15,000 to be moved. Anybody wanna guess how much wound up in my account? Nope. Even though a partial liquidation is supposed to be rejected if it can’t be followed exactly, it was the oddest amount you ever saw! I can even explain how it came to happen.But, I have no idea how to prevent it from happening again, nor how to execute my wonderful, master plan!I can’t even get the address changed on my mail any longer! Seriously! I paid $200/year to keep our old Portland PO Box open for two more years, because I couldn’t get the first class mail to stop going to the old address! The worst offender was my WIFE’S WORKPLACE! No, we don’t need our employees to get their notifications from us in a timely manner whatsoever! Or, even at all, given how well mail forwarding works most of the time!Our mail carrier admitted to sending our mail back because he didn’t know what else to do with it. Brokerage firms swear that they will only use your mailing address, never your permanent address. Then, when tax time comes, guess where they send the critical tax documents? Since we don’t have a mailbox, (it was stolen before we moved in), we rely on people doing what they SAY they are going to do. Too bad USPS “lost” our forwarding order. The mail carrier had no idea…Best of all, the county wanted to charge us $200 to change our street address. We have a stupid neighborhood address system that incorporates a LETTER after the street number, if the parcel was ever split. Looks like everybody lives in an apartment complex. Except that we don’t. We were something like 298C. I hated it. You can’t GET brass numbers for your house when there is a letter involved. Apartment dwellers wouldn’t waste a dime getting brass street numbers for their apartment.So how did I get the county to change the stupid number to something sensible? One day, I was fooling around on the county parcel database. I noticed that the idiot who set up the table structure failed to give street numbers an alphanumeric designation. Whoops! Automatically, the system rejects all street numbers with a letter in it, because it was designated as a NUMERIC field only!Whoa!?!Turns out, the county thinks of us as 298. Just dumped the letter entirely. Which makes a LOT of parcels look like they all have the same street address! I asked the guy at the desk, “Who is going to pay for the burial costs, when I call for a medical emergency, and the ambulance gets sent to our dead neighbor’s house?” Yep. Neighbor was an 84 year old WWII vet who got whacked. Nice town, eh? They found his car vandalized miles from where he ever drove. Never did find the body. So, even when the ambulance pulls up at his house, there is nobody to redirect traffic to a likely location.The county guy’s eyes get very big and round. “I think that we can fix up that little mistake for you for free”, he opines.Weeks later, I come back in to see how “progress” is going on our new street address. I get handed a copy of an email sent out to TWENTYSEVEN different government agencies via cc. Where was THE HOME OWNER’S name on that list? Don’t WE need to notify more people than anybody else?Apparently not. If I had not ever come in, we were not ever scheduled to be notified! HAHAHAHAH! Naturally, you STILL can’t find our house. They assigned us a number quite out of sequence with the neighbors. And Redfin refuses to update our new address. We are still 298C to them! I give up!I could go on for hours, but you already know the drill. Incompetence is the new virtue. You only have to show up on time in our town to demonstrate superior excellence at the workplace!