Snail Mailing address

Posted on December 20, 2024

The article presents an alternative mailing address - Permanent Mailing Address Alias (Pmaa).

Table of Contents

  1. Problem
    1. Personal mobility and relocation rate
    2. Keeping up to date efforts
    3. Personal experience
    4. Tax and budget
    5. Privacy and phishing
    6. Spam
    7. Address input validation
    8. Ecology and Global warming
    9. Desuetude
  2. Design Draft
    1. Postal Address (PA)
    2. Address Alias (AA)
    3. PMAA REST API
    4. Gradual implementation

Problem

The postal address system predates 3rd Industrial Revolution1 and the design overlooks capabilities appeared later with modern technologies, but it is still in use due to social inertia2 and the network effect3.

Let’s enumerate issues the mailing address system encounters today and draft a solution based on information technologies available.

If you agree up on the issues below, please, sign the petition.

Personal mobility and relocation rate

The number of state-to-state movers rose from 7.9 million in 2021 to 8.2 million in 2022. This shows a decade-long trend of state-to-state migration, which is expected to continue to increase even as overall migration numbers decline.4

Overall 40 million people changed their addresses in 2023 in the US. 5

Keeping up to date efforts

When a person moves, he/she should update his/her address in a few dozen systems:

  1. employer/university/school/military
  2. driver license
  3. vehicle registration
  4. voter registration
  5. IRS
  6. 5.3 bank accounts on average6
  7. dozens of shops (amazon, ebay, walmart, etc.)
  8. car insurance
  9. health insurance
  10. USPS forwarding
  11. mobile operator
  12. CCW
  13. internet provider (at least terminate contract automatically if new address is out of range)

How much time would it take to sync the address across all these systems?!

Many places have a web interface and/or a mobile app, but anyway the process is very routine and error prone. Recall all these security questions you need to answer and one-time codes to provide… Nobody wants to waste time on this.

Moreover, the IRS allows you to change the address through a paper mail only. Mail to the IRS can be delivered exclusively by USPS and USPS locations don’t provide a print service. So the mover has to plan a whole operation to complete the task!

USPS provides an option for mail forwarding but it is a half-measure.

Military mailing address has a common trait with the proposed design (mail follows the soldiers whenever they are), but such address also has limited scope and is not available for civilians.

It is worth to note that the Oath of Allegiance expects from a swearing person to bear arms on behalf of the US if required by the law. So the person in some way connected to the military service. This fact promotes the idea of extending military mailing address style to all citizens.

A PO box with a web interface is a great tool, but it is not applicable for bank accounts or DL, and the PO box user has to trust somebody with unsealing envelopes and scanning letters.

Personal experience

The article contains a lot of statistical references, but as the author, who is an experienced software engineer and who lived in 4 states, I confirm that the situation is unsatisfactory and requires serious revision taking advantage of new technologies.

Tax and budget

The time required for handling papers could be used for fun or earning extra dollars.

Let’s assume it would take 2 hours to update the address everywhere.

Per capita income in the past 12 months in 2023: $43,289. 7 There are 2080 working hours per year. So an average pay rate is $20 per hour.

2h * 4E7 * $20 = $1.6E9

The US economy is missing out $1.6 billion annually, because people are busy with keeping their mail addresses up to date.

Average federal income tax rate is 14.5% in 2022.8

0.145 * $1.6E9 = $232E6

Therefore the federal budget could get extra $232 million per annum, meanwhile US debt maximum systematically increases9.

Privacy and phishing10

A mail address stored in a database poses a threat for privacy similar to phone number or email address. 353 million of accounts leaked due data breaches in 2023 in the US.11

Mail address is indivisible from geo location.

Autobinding AA cannot be used by more than one sender. It means that AA leaked from an organization cannot be used for spamming or phishing by somebody else.

Spam

A mail address is vulnerable to massive spam delivery without even mentioning a particular recipient by name.

A person in PMAA should be able to disable delivery of mails addressed by postal address directly.

Businesses, you finished working with, tend to mail reminder letters periodically.

Dedicated AA can be invalidated and cannot be used after that.

Address input validation

Credit card number has a special encoding preventing a single typo in any digit.12 Regular mail address doesn’t have anything like that. Zip code cannot catch a typo in an apartment or building number.

Organizations such as DMV have extra requirements to the address person provides. They want to prove that the person lives there.

A person in PMAA can have only 1 postal address at any given time, but it is not exposed. So the previous requirement is fulfilled automatically.

Ecology and Global warming

I rented an apartment in Miami next to a beach. My mailbox was getting full of junk every week addressed to previous dwellers! I assume it is a common pattern for places with high tenant turnover.

Imagine how much paper and labor is wasted for letters, for which it is known in advance that they will not be read.

20g CO2 is produced per letter13

20g * 5 letter a week * 52 week a year = 5.2kg CO2

It is an equivalent of 12.92 lb of CO2 per annum per apartment.

Such a situation happens because USPS forwarding eventually expires, but the addressee is not interested anymore in updating the address everywhere it is mentioned.

A new tenant usually is also reluctant to stop the sender from future correspondence, because it is easier just to recycle such junk mail.

PMAA should help with breaking this vicious cycle.

Desuetude

U.S. Code section 39 §300414 (Delivery of mail to persons not residents of the place of address) is not enforced in practice:

Whenever the Postal Service determines that letters or parcels sent in the mail are addressed to places not the residence or regular business address of the person for whom they are intended, to enable the person to escape identification, the Postal Service may deliver the mail only upon identification of the person so addressed.

Design Draft

The best solution for minimizing efforts related to changing the postal address is to use permanent address alias (AA), which identifies the recipient in a unique way, which is resolved to a regular or military address every time up on shipping. Immutability of the AA is provided through its geo independence.

While a US person or a business may issue any number of AAs all AAs are always resolved to the same postal address (PA).

These days PA on an envelope is written mostly for convenience, because the envelope, before being shipped, is labeled by a unique barcode and the actual address is stored in the central database, which guides sorting robots to provide correct routing.

So the AA should not contain the literal PA of destination and infrastructure for PMAA implementation already exists.

Postal Address (PA)

PA is exposed to authorized shipping companies only (e.g. USPS, FedEx, DHL etc.) by resolution via AA and recipient name.

Delivery just by PA can be disabled to prevent spam.

Just a single PA can be bound to SSN or a foreign passport in case of an immigrant.

Address Alias (AA)

PA can be bound to any number of AAs. Ideally every time a person needs to fill a form containing a postal address an new AA might be issued by the system. AA dedicated to a specific sender closes the problem of leaks.

AA format can be the same as PA to minimize efforts with updating existing forms and database schemes.

It is enough to introduce a special zip code and city to intercept default routing.

Let every state to pick a name and zip code for a virtual city (e.g. Pmaa 99999) covering all address aliases. AA state may not be equal to the real state form PA, but AA state inherits PA state at the moment of issuing AA.

PA is used for sales tax calculation by online retailer stores. PMAA REST API should serve requests for getting current PA zip code by AA.

Unit number may be optional and serve as a Luhn-like hash of rest AA fields.

AA maps itself onto PA in a unique way. PA cannot be guessed by AA and one AA cannot be guessed by another AA.

AA can be bound to a specific sender (based on who used it first). This way dedicated AA solves problems with privacy, leaks and phishing, because even if AA leaks due a data breach AA cannot be used outside of the organization it is bound to.

Having multiple AAs mitigates risk of identity theft - a leaked AA from one system would not match AA in another place and using a mismatching address can trigger a stronger security check.

PMAA REST API

AA is useless without the PMAA database. REST API gives granular access to all parties. PMAA deals only with address translation.

  1. Check AA is valid (for reusable non autobinding AA).
  2. Bind AA to sender’s AA (atomic).
  3. Chech AA is bound to a sender.
  4. Get zip code and timestamp when PA was updated by providing AA and person Name. (e.g. DMV - proof of residence)
  5. Subscribe for email notification about invalidated AA or zip code or person name change (recalculate quote, invalidate DL).
  6. Issue AA.
  7. Invalidate AA.
  8. Register an account for a person or business.
  9. Submit a request for changing PA.
  10. Confirm new PA by a one-time code from a PMAA letter.
  11. List senders used the specified AA.
  12. List all AAs bound to the specified PA.
  13. Can a sender (identified by PA) send to the specified AA.
  14. Give the current zip code for AA for calculation of sales tax or LatLong near the specified AA where the LatLong coordinate and the associated PA have the same sales tax rules.
  15. Try to resolve AA, a recipient name and sender’s AA into the recipient’s PA.

Gradual implementation

PMAA can be deployed gradually in parallel with existing addressing approaches.

Footnotes

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Age

2 Clements, M.T. (2005). “Inefficient Standard Adoption: Inertia and Momentum Revisited”. Economic Inquiry. 43 (3): 507–518. https://doi.org/10.1093/ei/cbi034

3 Liebowitz, S.J.; S.E. Margolis (1994). “Network Externality: An Uncommon Tragedy”. The Journal of Economic Perspectives. 8 (2): 133–150. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.8.2.133

4 https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/11/state-to-state-migration.html

5 https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/geographic-mobility/2023/state-to-state-migration/State_to_State_Migration_Table_2023_T13.xlsx

6 https://www.paymentsjournal.com/how-many-bank-accounts-do-consumers-have/

7 https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/INC910223#INC910223

8 https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2025/

9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_debt_ceiling

10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing

11 https://www.statista.com/statistics/273550/data-breaches-recorded-in-the-united-states-by-number-of-breaches-and-records-exposed/

12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luhn_algorithm

13 https://www.fortomorrow.eu/en/blog/carbon-email

14 https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title39/part4/chapter30&edition=prelim