If you manage your mailing list on computer, the U.S. Postal
Service will upgrade your mailing list for you, FOR FREE. The
main service is to (A) validate/correct all 5-digit zip codes,
adding zip-plus-4 wherever possible. They will also (B) validate
the street or PO Box delivery address for deliverability, and (C)
standardize the entry for delivery addresses, city, and state.
There is also a service to (D) "clean" your mailing list by
doing changes-of-address for you -- the post office knows where
everybody in the United States has moved to (as long as they've
been notified!), and if the person on your list has moved, it
might be cheaper to have your mailing list updated by computer
than for you to pay 25 cents for each address correction when you
do a mass mailing. Unfortunately, service "D" is not free and
the United States Postal Service (hereafter, USPS) doesn't offer
it directly. You CAN, however, hire a USPS franchise to do it
for you. More on this later.
HOW TO START:
Contact your local branch post office and ask for your
"account representive." Every business in the U.S. has an
account rep, even if you never go to the post office. You do
have to be incorporated to use this service. The PO will tell
you the account rep's name. Ask for a copy of Postal Service
Form #5603, "Request for free ZIP+4 coding of address files on
diskettes," and assistance in updating your mailing list. The
form contains an application request and an instruction page,
telling you how to proceed. The document you're reading right
now describes this service in a little more detail.
WHAT'S NEEDED:
You must have 300 names (mininum) on your mailing list,
submitted on any standard-size diskette (3.5-, 5.25-, and 8-inch
disks are all acceptable). The diskettes submitted can be
created on most computer operating systems. Nearly all MS-DOS or
CP/M formatted disks are acceptable; some Apple disks are okay,
but Macintosh is not.
The mailing list must be in a true "record" format, i.e.,
one line per record, NOT the output text as it usually appears on
the mailing label, with 3 or 4 lines per entry. (If it's not
evident yet, a "record" is a single entry created with a data
management program, not your favorite word processor, containing
the name, delivery address, city, state, zip, phone, id numbers,
date of birth, and similar information you may require.) Each
record must be terminated with a newline, usually a carriage
return/linefeed combination. The datafile must contain FIXED-
LENGTH fields and FIXED-LENGTH records. If your records are
delimited with anything other than a carriage return/linefeed
combination (0D 0A hex), it can still be processed, but you
should indicate this on the request form.
Only 1 file may be on each disk. If the file is too long to
fit on a single diskette, it may be spread over multiple disks.
The file will be overwritten unless you supply a blank, formatted
disk for the output file. The file you submit may be in either
mixed upper-and-lower case letters, or in all upper case (solid
caps). If the output file (the one the USPS sends back after
updating it) must contain mixed upper-and-lower case letters, the
post office can only do zip code update (A), and delivery
validation (B), above. If you also want the delivery address
standardized (C), the file must be submitted in all caps.
HOW DO THESE CORRECTIONS DIFFER?
(A) ZIP code correction and encoding with ZIP+4
If your input city/state/zip is
HOLLYWOODE, CALIF 90082
correcting the zip will change it to: 90028
adding zip-plus-4 will change it to: 90028-8521
"HOLLYWOODE" will remain misspelled.
(B) Validation of the delivery address.
This means that the street address will be checked to see
that it is a deliverable address, not a vacant lot. Validation
of the address does NOT insure that the addressee (e.g., JOHN
JONES) lives there. The USPS pays no attention to the name of
the recipient. All it does is confirm that someone receives mail
at that address. Any addresses that aren't legitimate will be
indicated in report returned with your diskette.
(C) Standardize spelling of delivery address and/or the city and
state.
This means that if your input data is:
APARTMENT 230
5505 SUNSETTE <- note misspelled street name
HOLLYWOODE, CALIF etc. <- note misspelled city name
The output data will be:
5505 W SUNSET BLVD #230 <- standardized delivery address
HOLLYWOOD, CA etc. <- standard city/state spelling
Remember, standardization (including spelling correction) is
only available if your input file is in upper case.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
The presence of Canadian and foreign addresses mixed in with
the U.S. addresses in your datafile makes no difference. If the
zip code field contains Canadian and other foreign postal codes,
that's okay, too. The USPS will not correct or validate these
records, but their presence is not a problem.
The input file cannot contain any special document-
formatting or control characters (remember, this is a datafile,
not a document file). Nulls (00 hex) are okay if they are used
to pad unused characters in the fields, though spaces (20 hex)
are more common. As stated previously, the critical thing is
that the fields be fixed-length, i.e., all fields must begin at
the same character position in each record. You will be asked to
provide the length of the address-related fields, and the
character position each field begins at.
The application form specifies the maximum length for
certain fields. For the zip code, it specifies that the maximum
length be 5 characters, but this is an apparent error. If you
have already started using zip-plus-4 and set up your zip code
field to accept 9 or 10 characters, or more, the USPS will still
process this field properly.
For those who need a perpetual reminder, NEVER send in your
original or only copy of your datafile. Send the U.S. Postal
Service a duplicate of the datafile. Ideally, you should have
back-up copies of an important mailing list (and all major
programs and documents) in several locations, in case of fire or
an electrical disaster.
The application form specifies that the diskettes you send
them "must be in the 'copy' or transfer mode, not the 'backup' or
save/restore mode." This primarily applies to MS-DOS or similar
users, who use a back-up program which encodes or compresses the
data when performing the backup. The USPS wants normal,
printable characters, not encoded or compressed data. (However,
a technical support specialist told me that, despite this
admonition, they WILL accept backed-up/compressed copies if
created with the BACKUP utility for MS-DOS version 3.1 or
higher.)
The USPS promises that "all diskettes will be processed in
strict confidence." You will mail the disk(s) to a special
office in Memphis, Tennessee. Processing will take about 3
weeks. And again, this service is FREE.
WHAT ABOUT CHANGES OF ADDRESS?
The USPS will NOT do changes-of-address (COAs) for you,
since they ignore the name field(s) of your file. However, there
is a way to get this done. The Postal Service leases COA
information to private vendors for a fee, in a franchise-type of
operation. The private corporations are strictly regulated in
how they handle the data provided them by both the consumers and
the USPS. You simply contact the nearest NCOA Service, whose
name and address can be provided by your postal account rep.
The NCOA service corporation will charge you according to
the size of the mailing list, and various auxillary services you
may request.
CHICAGO-AREA NCOA SERVICES:
The following are some NCOA (National Change Of Address)
services located in metro Chicago. There are others across the
country; call your local postal account rep for names/addresses
of ones in your state or region.
May & Speh, Inc.
Attn: Dale Ibis
18 W. 100 22nd Street
Oakbrook Terrace, IL 60181-4403
Tel. (312) 620-8060
Metro Mail Corp.
360 E. 22nd Street
Lombard, IL 60148-4924
Tel. (312) 620-3196
R.R. Donnelley & Sons
Attn: Steve Sieloff
1815 S. Prairie Ave.
Chicago, IL 60616-1391
Tel. (312) 326-7166
Direct Marketing Technologies
955 American Lane
Schaumburg, IL 60173-4843
Tel. (312) 843-5600
Finally, if you have any further questions about technical
requirements related to datafile structure, disk format, etc.,
or other specs required for this service, please contact:
Val Pailloz
Marketing and Communications
Central Regional Office, U.S. Postal Service
433 W. Van Buren
Chicago, IL 60699-0832
Tel. (312) 765-5183
Thanks to Val for her assistance in preparing this document.
Written by Eric Pement (rev. 10/26/88).
