When you move to a new home or office, you can keep the same "Postal Domain Name", but change the address associated to it. Once.
Not sure how to convince all the big entities to use it, but it could catch on if you could convince some smaller companies to allow users to use it in their account settings.
Any ideas what are the integration methods at the sender sides? They'd obviously need to collect the new id number and automatically find the current address.
I'd also wonder if financial institutions can use such a service at all, they probably have some stringent requirements to change the address of a person and are obligated to keep an address on record (at least in Israel they are).
A way to do this could be to use a kind of proxy address. That way you would not have to convince every postal service to adopt some new system. The problem with that, of cause, is that it most likely would take you mail much longer to arrive, and you have another 3rd party (4th party?) service provider involved to potentially make mistakes and compromise security.
I've seen similar ideas to this (central location to change/update all your addresses on file) over the years. I decided to just hack my own solution to the problem since I move and travel a lot and it became a pain point long ago rather than wait around for a viable solution to come forward.
I've never heard of anyone being able to send mail to a person using only their name on an envelope.
You would have a unique "ID" which you can assign to any physical address. This is all you ever give out. If you move, you update one record, and your mail will come to the right place.
I see what you are saying and I like it a lot. I think you would still need a way to have people discover the current state you live in. One thing that comes to mind is taxes that differ per state. If I told amazon to ship my package to bob@foo.bar they would still need to know where I live.
You give Amazon your ID number. They do a lookup on the ID when you place an order to receive the current mailing address. It would apply to everything, so you give all of your friends and family your mailing ID. Anytime they want to send you something, they run a lookup on the ID (enter it into a website) and get your current address.
It's similar to a website. If HN moves to another server, everyone doesn't have to update their bookmarks to point to a new IP address. Instead, they visit the same URL as always, and it automatically sends everyone to the new IP.
I think it would only work if the USPTO was in on it, instead of forcing everyone to look up the address. It should still be publicly available (for the Amazon case, and such), but not required just to send something.
Interestingly enough a colleague of mine managed to send a post card to himself from a different country using only his email address as identifier. Of course the email address was on the form
When you move to a new home or office, you can keep the same "Postal Domain Name", but change the address associated to it. Once.
Not sure how to convince all the big entities to use it, but it could catch on if you could convince some smaller companies to allow users to use it in their account settings.