An idea - Domain name used as postal address?

[stijnm]

Hi all,

I had to post a snail-mail and had to write the address of the recipient on the back. I couldn't find it immediately and it was quite long to have to write - and write legibly.

I then had an insight: Seeing as domains have to be registered, how easy would it be to just write said domain name on the back of the envelope? (instead of the multiline real postal address)

The post office could then take care of the conversion from the domain name to the actual postal address by a whois.

For example, thedailywtf has a postal addres for its sticker campaign ( http://thedailywtf.com/Swag/WTF-Sticker.aspx ). The postal office then receives a mail with address 'thedailywtf.com', does a whois and thus gets the correct postal address!

What do you think?

[ulf]

How shall this work at the end of the chain? Does the postoffice somewhere print the actual address on the envelope or does the postman get a bunch of letters without addresses and has to perform the lookup again?

[adbachman → ulf]

Agreed, it's a last mile problem.

When I get a letter addressed to 914 instead of 918, I know which house it's supposed to go to. No effort required after step one: address envelope.

It'd be easy enough to hand out your address as a url, "just whois me." But to ask the postal systems of every single country on earth to do the translation for you is over the top (steps two through n). Put the onus on the user (sender) to do the google.com == 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway translation.

(I smell a weekend webapp)

[stijnm → adbachman]

I could imagine the post office put a sticker on the envelope with the real address. This guarantees a correct address (as long as the whois info is correct).

Of course, have to see if it is practical or not.

There is a service in Belgium that if you move house you can pay the postal service a small fee (20EUR) and they will forward mail sent to your old address to your new address over a 6 month period. When they do this they simply put a sticker over the incorrect address.

I am guessing this is autmated and is a similar problem as my proposition.

[phlatphrog2]

This actually worked. Once.

I am one of the founders of Guam's first ISP, back in '93. We used the domain guam.net.

One day a letter arrived from England with only an email address on the front. There was no delivery address. Not even a name. Just an email address.

We were a bit puzzled, but it was pretty clear that the UK (or where ever it was) postal system recognized that Guam was a U.S. territory and sent it to the U.S. The U.S. postal system sent it to the main post office on Guam. Since Guam is a small place, the local postal people were familiar with "guam.net" and knew where our office was, and delivered it to us.

Since we, the ISP, knew the customer (in our database), we called him up and said he had a letter. He came by and picked it up. He was as amazed as we were.

[jonnytran]

I've thought about this before. I move fairly often. But why in the world should I have to update my address with 27 different places every time. Why can't I simply have a virtual mailing address that I give out to people, and when people mail things there, it gets looked up after it reaches the post office. And then, when I move I simply update the physical address in one spot. I do this already when I set a forwarding address with the USPS.

In order to increase adoption, I was thinking that in addition to a simple domain name, it would also have a human-readable addr1/addr2/city/state/zip format to be backward compatible with current mailing address forms. If you're concerned about redundancy, it can go in here. If the address still can't be read by the post office, it will return to sender or route the same way a dead letter would.

I even thought about making a startup out of this by implementing this routing myself using the post office as a service. In other words, people could register a virtual address with my company, and when giving out their address, give out my company's address where the address-line-2 indicates their "domain". When my company receives the mail, it does a lookup on the virtual address and remails the letter/package to the physical address registered. Since this is a convenience for the owner of the virtual address, they can pay my company per thing routed, so they only ever pay when it actually gets used. But this easily allows my company to pass the remailing postal charge on to my customers. I think remailing would be acceptable to me as a user, b/c 95% of all the mail I get, it wouldn't matter if it took twice as long to get to me. For things that required speed of delivery, I would probably make sure something special happened anyway, like priority mail or fedex. Of course, people are then going to want to do things like get an email about something they received before paying for the routing, which I think would be cool as a user anyway.

Using DNS for routing is a good idea though. It's already redundant and reliable. It also avoids concerns of criminals using this as a way to hide their address, since anyone can just do a WHOIS on it.

I didn't pursue this idea because I figured reading hand-written addresses was a hard problem, and it would make more sense to simply be implemented by the postal service itself to avoid remailing. But how in the world do we convince the postal service to add this feature?

[stijnm]

They already automate much of the sorting by scanning in the address (if legibly written).

Would be small effort to scan a domain name and then do a lookup.

Some benefits (broad assumptions): - less to write so chance of it being legible goes up - no need to figure out postal address info - companies will like it because single brand name on envelope

And I am sure there are others. And I am also sure there are some disadvantages...

[mooism2]

A disadvantage is that if a single character of a domain name is illegible, they can't run a whois on it. With a normal postal address there is some redundancy.

[asciilifeform]

Prepare for an ocean of (paper) spam.

Ever register a domain with your real snail-mail address (rather than the ubiquitous proxies most registrars offer)?

[jdavid]

to make this better, the post office could support openid, do the lookup, and then deliver the mail.

i like it, but doubt the post office would ever figure it out.

so you need to start your own postal company to do just this, deliver mail to domain names and openids

[treitnauer]

Ever heard of .TEL domains? They're the perfect solution to this problem...

[vaksel]

so you think the post office is going to waste a crapload of man hours just to lookup domain names for the 1-2 techies?