What’s Your Address?

By Gene Del Polito, PostCom president

For as long as any of us can remember, to use mail properly required the use of a postal address affixed somewhere on the mail piece to ensure accurate and timely mail delivery. While what we call a "postal address" has evolved over time to ensure a fuller explication of where the mail was intended to go, the function has been the same.

Today, the address has come to mean much more than simply where do you live. Our "address," which can come in many guises, also becomes a means for identifying who we are and how we can be reached any time during the day. In addition to our postal address, many of us are reached or identified by our internet email address, our SMS address, our cellphone numbers and our landline phone numbers. Each of these alternatives is governed by an addressing protocol of its own.

All these communication methods are important because, today, our need to communicate is manifested in ways that never existed more than two centuries ago. In addition to written or printed messages distributed by mail, we typically share our thoughts and conduct our business through electronic means that most typically do not require the exchange of paper. In fact, today, most interpersonal communication (other than that conducted on a face-to-face basis) takes place by way of telecommunications. Using the hard-wired telephone (landline), the wireless phone, and the internet has supplanted much of what would have previously existed as written communication exchanged in the mail.

For some of us, making ourselves widely available to communication with others in all available communication channels requires the memorization of a whale of a lot of addressing information. That presents many people with quite a challenge. An even greater challenge is ensuring that every single element of any address we use is without error, since most modern day communication exchanges are mediated over machines that operate primarily on the coding of binary digits and nothing more.

Whether we like it or not, we live in a more complicated and sometimes dangerous world. The post-911 anthrax-in-the-mail crisis we all had to endure is one example of today's dangers and also an example of one of modern life's more significant addressing challenges. The anthrax crisis caused millions of people to question the wisdom of accepting hard-copy written communication. In addition, rapidly evolving electronic communication alternatives prompted people to wonder if physical mail still was a necessity or was something that could be supplanted or supplemented in some electronic form. In part, it could, but facilitating the exchange of messages within and across disparate media required the use of some common element that could readily identify to whom and to where the message was to be directed, i.e., an "address" either in its more familiar postal form or some other that was particular to the channel used.

Unfortunately, needing to remember multiple addressing systems adds an irksome complexity to efficient modern day communication. Wouldn't life be neat if it were possible to easily translate an email address or a cell phone number (address) into a geographical postal address without much fuss or bother?

In most of the undeveloped world, this need for a unified addressing database that is discernible in printed or electronic form is sorely needed. For instance, in many nations around the world, people opt to communicate and do business via cellular or satellite-linked telecommunication as the alternative to using their own nation's unreliable postal service. For instance, more communication takes place today in a nation like Kenya via wireless voice and short messaging communication than by mail. In some instances, making the costly investment necessary to develop or improve an efficient, reliable postal infrastructure is out of the question. The continued and intensified use of electronic communication as an alternative to postal delivery is a much more likely outcome.

The need for some common, cross-media, addressing database is highlighted even more when you look at the challenge lesser developed countries face when more than thoughts need to be communicated and exchanged. Can you imagine the challenge a package delivery service, such as UPS, must face as its tasked with making a timely and accurate delivery to a person who placed the package order by wireless telecommunication and whose actual physical location is obscured by an insufficient or non-existent postal delivery address?

Who are you? Where are you? What do you want, and where shall it be provided lay out the true challenge of modern day addressing systems. To meet today's evolving needs, addressing needs to transcend the limits and the conventions of the media actually used. Until and unless we can devise an addressing system that can take an "address" in a postal or electronic form and relate it to a specific delivery point at some geographic location, our ability to actualize the full potential of modern day systems for communicating and transacting business will be limited.

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More About OutputLinks Columnist
Gene A. Del Polito, Ph.D.

For the past 24 years, Dr. Gene Del Polito has served as the President of the Association for Postal Commerce in Washington, D.C. He is highly regarded within the postal community as an effective advocate in behalf of those who use  mail for business communication and commerce. Del Polito received PostCom's J. Edward Day Award, the association's highest honor granted in recognition of "distinguished service to the nation's postal community," PostCom's Lee Epstein Award given in recognition of "outstanding service in behalf of the business mailing industry;" the Mail Advertising Service Association's Miles Kimball Award, the highest award MASA gives to non-members of its association in recognition of his work in behalf of the mail advertising and marketing industry; the Direct Marketing Club of New York's Mal Dunn Leadership Award "in recognition of his outstanding leadership and contribution to the industry"; the MailCom Franklin Award for "outstanding service in behalf of the business mailing industry;" and the Greater Washington Society of Association Executives' Monument Award for Excellence in Communications.

Del Polito serves on the Postmaster General's Mailers Technical Advisory Committee, and has been a member of a number of Postal Service-industry work groups and task forces over the years. He also serves as a member of the Consultative Committee of the Universal Postal Union, and the UPU's Direct Mail Advisory Board where he serves as co-vice-chairman. He has served on the Smithsonian National Postal Museum's Advisory Council, and he is a frequent speaker at postal gatherings and conferences around the nation.