At 08:47 PM 10/16/00 -0500, Paul O. Johnson wrote:
... two-letter abbreviations ...
How many people have questioned the necessity of the USPS rule requiring doubly-redundant addresses on envelopes that we send by mail? Why must we write the city AND the state AND the zip code.
And the addressee-name is largely redundant with the other things, so we're approaching triple-redundancy.
But fear not, O ye denizens of the land of the free and the home of the brave!
You are free to spell out the state name if you don't like the two-letter abbreviations.
You are free to omit the ZIP code if you want -- the postal inspector will not imprison you in a mailbox for the rest of your life.
Or you can use the ZIP code and omit the city and state.
However, let me suggest that a certain amount of redundancy is good for you. Once upon a time my buddies and I invented some Optical Character Recognition technology that we sold to the USPS among others. Our OCR machine was never able to scan ZIP codes with more than 99% accuracy. That is mainly because something approaching 1% of all the envelopes have _wrong_ ZIP codes on them. Not just illegible, just plain wrong. (I inadvertently contributed to this statistic once, by filling out a form with my home address and office ZIP code. This got into a government database, and generated mis-addressed mailings for years afterward.)