

An idea - Domain name used as postal address? - stijnm

Hi all,<p>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.<p>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)<p>The post office could then take care of the conversion from the domain name to the actual postal address by a whois.<p>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!<p>What do you think?
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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?

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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.

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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
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
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.

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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...

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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.

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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)?

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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

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

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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?

