Post codes: 5 years ago, my country brought in post codes. prior to this there were none. It was not for the benefit of our postal system, who stated they didn't really care, but for badly designed web forms (and the occasional rural house with an unhelpful address)
They also may not fit your convention of what addresses in your country are. The obvious examples are stuff like Japan and one or two central European cities that are addressed "Building number, Block Number, City", but the aforementioned unhelpful rural addresses include a former friend of mine who had to give his address as "House name, near village, County". Actually the village was not near but it got the mail to the right post office which knew what to do with it.
As a counterpoint, I've had places that have very strict fields like "Street Name" (20 char limit), City, County, Country. For a few years I lived on a street who's name appeared three times in the same city. The actual form to get it delivered was "Street name, Locality, City", but because of the length limits I had to sneak the locality into the City field, which luckily worked as the City and County shared a name.