Reply #34: addresses [View All]

As far as I can tell, the post office doesn't pay much attention to what's on an envelope, so it wouldn't matter what you put on it. ;)

(Hey, I'll bet that's something else a USAm'n and a Cdn can agree on. The Brit mail is much better, of course.)

House number and postal code? You mean number+street name, and leave out the city and province? Yeah, it would get there no problem. (Me, I'm old enough to know when local mail was addressed "123 Maple Street, City", i.e. just "City" instead of the name of the city.) People are more likely to put street address and city and province, though, since nobody actually looks up postal codes they don't know. The specificity of yours is like ours -- my city block consists of about 6 houses, although I may be wrong and my postal code may cover a four-block length of one side of the street, which would be maybe 30 houses. ... Nope, found Canada Post's lookup site, my postal code is just us six's.

The advantage of yours in the UK is that the starting letters identify the location intuitively, whereas our codes are just assigned in order, and you'd have to look it up to know where postal code "P__-___" was, for instance. I don't have a clue.

I have a friend who used to work in a post office in a town in southern Ontario whose postal codes started with "N0N" (N zero N). She figured out that lot of companies apparently had their mailing software programmed to enter "NON-ONO" (no no no) if they don't know the addressee's code, and a lot of mail ended up in southern Ontario that shouldn't have.

By the way, in case anyone wants to make a note, Santa Claus (who lives at the north pole, which is of course in Canada) can be reached at postal code H0H 0H0. Letters will be answered by unionized elves.