As a clerk in my church, one of my responsibilities is to make sure that the mailing addresses of members are accurate in our records. I recently came across a free service offered by MelissaDATA of Rancho Santa Margarita, CA that makes it a snap. (I’ll probably even use it to check my Christmas card list…)
Their Bad Address Check page lets you verify that addresses you have exist – that is, that the post office can deliver to a particular address. Of course, your records could have a family living at a perfectly good (but wrong) address. The address ‘100 Main Street’ may be absolutely proper but the Smith family may not live there. MelissaDATA doesn’t help if that’s the problem. Instead, this service identifies ‘bad’ addresses – a street name that doesn’t exist or that is very badly misspelled, a number that doesn’t exist on a street or an apartment number that doesn’t exist. These are the kind of things that cause a letter to be undeliverable – and that would make it very hard to visit someone if you wanted.
You can test up to 1000 addresses at a time. You can either copy and paste your list into the web page or you can import an Excel or text file. Text files must have the fields separated with commas, tabs or vertical bars.
After checking the addresses, you get a table that shows all your addresses. If an address is not accurate, the program tells you what the problem is. On a recent list that I checked, here were some of the errors:
- The number on the street doesn’t exist. For example, there may be no 99 Belle Terre.
- The unit number is missing (it’s an apartment complex and I didn’t have the apartment number)
- Apt 7 is not used. There’s no apartment number 7 in this complex.
- Street name error. There’s no such street in the city or zip code in your list.
You can have the program add information to your list – things like the Plus4 zip code (that’s the 4 digits after the regular zip code), the U.S. carrier route, the county name, and mysterious things called the County FIPs and Delivery Point Code.
The program does more than just tell you there’s a problem. It also tries to help you fix it. For example, when you have the wrong number on a street, it will let you look up people who live on that street. If you’re lucky, you just got the wrong number and can find the name (and correct number).
If you have the wrong zip code, it will automatically put in the correct one (but, unfortunately, doesn’t flag that change so you can easily see it and correct it in your own list).
If the name of the street is misspelled in your original list, it will fix the spelling. And it’s quite good. For example, I live on a street called Susannah Place. To test the program, I used both “Susanna” and “Susan.” As long as I had the right city (even if the zip code was wrong), the program was able to figure out that I lived on Susannah Place and fixed the problems – though again it didn’t flag the change. It was only when I had the wrong city and right zip code that the program had a problem.
If you use a street name that doesn’t exist, you can pop up a list of all the streets that do exist in the zip code listed. Click on a street name and you get ranges of acceptable addresses on that street. Very nifty.
I find that after copying the resulting table back into an Excel spreadsheet, I compare the original with the fixed table from the webpage to identify any fixes MelissaDATA made but didn’t flag for me (zip codes added or changes, street name misspellings it fixed, etc.)
Best of all? It’s a free service. Who can ask for more?
MelissaDATA also offers a number of other free lookup services. I’ll talk about how I use some of them later.
Related articles from WalterBristow.com:
- 12 Ways to Find an Email Address
- Phishing and Malware: How Bad Do Things Have to Get Before We Hire a Sheriff?
- Argh! Fighting Those #@*! Telemarketers for Car Warranties and Credit Card Interest Rates
- Google Voice – It Will Change How You Use Your Phone
- Are You Drowning in the Information Glut of the Internet Ocean? Here’s a Life Preserver.
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Actually, if you’re just doing a few addresses (your Christmas card list), you can use the Zip Code lookup service at USPS.com.
The advantage is that the USPS database drills a little deeper than the commercial software products (of which Melissa Data is one). Commercial software oftentimes uses a ‘range’ of valid addresses, whereas the USPS database will tell you specifically if a given address is deliverable.
Note also that USPS deliverable does not equate to “address exists.” These days, many rural folks are being assigned “real” addresses to facilitate 911 emergency services. But many don’t get mail delivery there — they still use PO Box. In that case, the USPS returns an unfound or undeliverable address. Of course, that address is probably perfectly acceptable for UPS/Fedex deliveries.
And a corollary to that — as rural areas get assigned “real” addresses, old-timers tend to use the old name they’ve used for years. They might still say they live at “Old Jones Farm Road” — sometimes even without a house number! But the Post Office and 911 emergency responders will only know that address as “100 County Road 10″ or some such. And no software solution is going to help you solve that problem.
As Robert pointed out the USPS ZIP code lookup does provide the service, and it is possible that it is more accurate, the down side of using it is that it is limited to one address at a time for free.
Also as Robert pointed out, and as I can verify through my past church work, the deliverable address aspect of the post office data base is not just limited to rural addresses, many LDS church buildings do not have “real” addresses from the post office point of view because they do not deliver mail to those addresses.
Another area that can be a concern for people attempting to visit someone at a location based on the USPS “correct” address is that there is a small percentage of addresses which are not exactly the same in the USPS data base and the data bases that online mapping services use. I have found that on-line property tax rolls, if they are available can, be useful in resolving this. And if you can’t verify the address because the information you have is incorrect, you can often get the information if you know the name of the property owner. In many Texas counties the tax rolls are accessable on-line and addresses can be looked up via that mechanism, some even have maps that will show the location of the property. I don’t know how widely available this is in other states.
Another on-line service that is useful is Zillow, http://www.zillow.com, which is primarily a real estate listing site, and has maps which will show the location of an address on a map. There are some areas where their database is not yet up to date, but they are rapidly improving.