Comment by tshaddox | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tshaddox | Hacker News Reader

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I'm glad you had a good experience. I recently had a terrible experience with what should have been an even simpler verification process.

My wife and I ended up moving (within California) on short notice that overlapped my wife's unrelated trip out of the country. Despite very clear documentation on the USPS website about the documentation required for me to verify my wife's identity (and my relationship to her) in order to complete a Change of Address order on her behalf, the USPS employee immediately and aggressively accused me of attempting identity theft. No amount of showing him the USPS documentation about how to verify a spouse's identity would convince him.

At the second USPS office I tried, the guy was very nice, but also said that due to a high rate of identity theft they are refusing to do anything without the person there.

Luckily we only had a short interval where mail wasn't being forwarded before my wife returned and verified her identity in person, and probably didn't miss any important mail.

> but also said that due to a high rate of identity theft they are refusing to do anything without the person there.

This is the part of processes that annoys me the most. A company or agency will publish the rules they want people to follow, then there's a 30% chance that when I go to follow them, I will be denied because of an unpublished rule or an exception like this of "oh, well we're just not doing that right now."

The whole point of the USPS policies on being able to confirm a relationship is to avoid identity theft. If the policy is no longer going to be used then remove it! Or, better yet, update it.

With USPS, not to put too fine a point on it, there's also "I'm saying we're not doing this right now, because I don't want to do this work right now."

(With deference to all the other, amazing USPS folks I've worked with!)

That's when you start throwing around terms like "CFR" and "Inspector General"

I've found that USPS has a vast gulf between their IT systems (generally good!) and their line workers, as well as a huge training spread from line worker to line worker.

The best approach is usually to go to another postal branch when you run into a bad egg... and/or go during a time of day that it's quieter.

I have always filled out change of address online with no issues. But I suppose it’s been 5-6 years since I last did this.

When you do it online they have some sort of risk estimation thing where you provide (if I remember correctly) a credit card and a phone number. When I completed mine online, it said I was instantly verified, but for my wife it said additional in-person verification was required. I suspect it's because she changed her name when we got married and whatever online identity service they use has a combination of her old and new names.

Their system is quite picky about address formatting (they ask to do a small transaction; you billing address better match the address USPS has for you exactly, stuff like RD vs road matters).

I ended up changing my billing address in my bank to exactly match what USPS wanted. Which worked, and was fine, but did leave me wondering what would prevent someone else from doing that with their own bank account if they wanted to change my address for some weird reason.

So you signed up for a bank account with an address that wasn't properly formatted and you're upset at the USPS?

I thought it was common knowledge to, when moving to a new address, check one is using the correct formatting via the USPS online validator.

It's picky because "rd" is not valid. You would know this if you did a simple google search:

https://pe.usps.com/text/pub28/28apf.htm

RD vs road wasn’t the exact issue, it was just that sort of thing.

They managed to deliver mail to the previous address for years, so I guess they were able to figure it out.

Why do you think I’m upset? It was slightly annoying but not really a big deal, easy enough to fix, just thought it was a funny story.

That's a combination of the human part of the USPS, plus automated validation/correction routines.

To the human part: If you send a letter to a residence; and only include a street address plus 5-digit Zip code, or a street address plus city/state without a Zip code; that's enough to get the letter through. The envelope might be scanned at the originating point, and the image sent to a human for review, or the letter might make it to a post office at/near the destination, and a human will take it.

Sticking with the "rd" / "road" example: When the bank goes to mail something to you, I wouldn't be surprised if they run the address through a validation program. That validation program would catch things like "rd", replace it with the appropriate term, and also generate the Zip+4 code. What's missing is feedback from that program. So the bank might continue to have "rd" in your address, even though it's wrong.

As it happens, the USPS actually has an online form for this service [0]. For instance, if I query "1600 pennsylvania avenue" in Washington, DC, then I get the full two-line address back on page 2, complete with the Zip+4 code:

  1600 PENNSYLVANIA AVE NW
  WASHINGTON DC 20500-0005

I've used this tool before to double-check some more wonky addresses before sending mail to them. I'd be surprised if they don't also offer an API for the service.

[0] https://tools.usps.com/zip-code-lookup.htm?byaddress

They do, it's free, and their developer website is shockingly nice. https://developer.usps.com/api/18

This works wonderful until the site tries to force the suggestion on you and your address is somehow wonky in the system like not existing at all or under a wrong or mis-ordered apartment number.

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