Everybody use mails, but the postal address system predates 3rd Industrial Revolution [1] and the design overlooks capabilities appeared later with modern technologies, but it is still in use due to social inertia [2] and the network effect [3].

Let’s enumerate issues the mailing address system encounters today and show how permanent mailing address aliases (PMAA) resolve these issues.

Personal mobility and relocation rate
The number of state-to-state movers rose from 7.9 million in 2021 to 8.2 million in 2022. This shows a decade-long trend of state-to-state migration, which is expected to continue to increase even as overall migration numbers decline. [4]

Overall 40 million people changed their addresses in 2023 in the US. [5]

Keeping up to date efforts
When a person moves, he/she should update his/her address in a few dozen systems:

1. employer/university/school/military
2. driver license
3. vehicle registration
4. voter registration
5. IRS
6. 5.3 bank accounts on average [6]
7. dozens of shops (amazon, ebay, walmart, etc.)
8. car insurance
9. health insurance
10. USPS forwarding
11. mobile operator
12. CCW
13. internet provider (at least terminate contract automatically if new address is out of range)

How much time would it take to sync the address across all these systems?!

Many places have a web interface and/or a mobile app, but anyway the process is very routine and error prone. Recall all these security questions you need to answer and one-time codes to provide… Nobody wants to waste time on this.

Moreover, the IRS allows you to change the address through a paper mail only. Mail to the IRS can be delivered exclusively by USPS and USPS locations don’t provide a print service. So the mover has to plan a whole operation to complete the task!

USPS provides an option for mail forwarding but it is a half-measure.

Military mailing address has a common trait with the proposed design (mail follows the soldiers whenever they are), but such address also has limited scope and is not available for civilians.

It is worth to note that the Oath of Allegiance expects from a swearing person to bear arms on behalf of the US if required by the law. So the person in some way connected to the military service. This fact promotes the idea of extending military mailing address style to all citizens.

A PO box with a web interface is a great tool, but it is not applicable for bank accounts or DL, and the PO box user has to trust somebody with unsealing envelopes and scanning letters.

Tax and budget
The time required for handling papers could be used for fun or earning extra dollars.

Let’s assume it would take 2 hours to update the address everywhere.

Per capita income in the past 12 months in 2023: $43,289 [7]. There are 2080 working hours per year. So an average pay rate is $20 per hour.

    2h * 4E7 * $20 = $1.6E9

The US economy is missing out $1.6 billion annually, because people are busy with keeping their mail addresses up to date.

Average federal income tax rate is 14.5% in 2022. [8]

    0.145 * $1.6E9 = $232E6

Therefore the federal budget could get extra $232 million per annum, meanwhile US debt maximum systematically increases [9].

Privacy and phishing [10]
A mail address stored in a database poses a threat for privacy similar to phone number or email address. 353 million of accounts leaked due data breaches in 2023 in the US. [11]

Mail address is indivisible from geo location.

An auto-binding address alias (AA) cannot be used by more than one sender. It means that AA leaked from an organization cannot be used for spamming or phishing by somebody else.

Spam
A mail address is vulnerable to massive spam delivery without even mentioning a particular recipient by name.

A person in PMAA should be able to disable delivery of mails addressed by postal address directly.

Businesses, you finished working with, tend to mail reminder letters periodically.

Dedicated AA can be invalidated and cannot be used after that.

Address input validation
Credit card number has a special encoding preventing a single typo in any digit. [12] Regular mail address doesn’t have anything like that. Zip code cannot catch a typo in an apartment or building number.

Organizations such as DMV have extra requirements to the address person provides. They want to prove that the person lives there.

A person in PMAA can have only 1 postal address at any given time, but it is not exposed. So the previous requirement is fulfilled automatically.

Ecology and Global warming
I rented an apartment in Miami next to a beach. My mailbox was getting full of junk every week addressed to previous dwellers! I assume it is a common pattern for places with high tenant turnover.

Imagine how much paper and labor is wasted for letters, for which it is known in advance that they will not be read.

20g CO2 is produced per letter [13]

20g * 5 letter a week * 52 week a year = 5.2kg CO2

It is an equivalent of 12.92 lb of CO2 per annum per apartment.

Such a situation happens because USPS forwarding eventually expires, but the addressee is not interested anymore in updating the address everywhere it is mentioned.

A new tenant usually is also reluctant to stop the sender from future correspondence, because it is easier just to recycle such junk mail.

PMAA should help with breaking this vicious cycle.

Desuetude
U.S. Code section 39 §3004 [14] (Delivery of mail to persons not residents of the place of address) is not enforced in practice.

 

Solution

The best solution for issues mentioned above is to use permanent address alias (AA) instead of real postal address, which identifies the recipient in a unique way and is resolved to a regular or military address every time up on shipping. Immutability of the AA is provided through its geo independence.

Technical details are explained in my blog post.