How to improve email addresses
Hello! We at Dadat are well versed in email addresses - we fix and supplement them for five thousand online stores, CRM and startups.
Today I will tell you why the traditional mailing address system seems to be defective and will offer a "cloudy" way to fix it.
The first postal addresses were the names of people. In ancient Persia and India, the cities were small, everyone knew each other personally and remembered who lives where. Later, the cities began to grow, and the address system was not enough.
')
In European countries, addresses are attached to the streets. The streets were given names, and the houses on them
- numbers. In China, Thailand and Japan, cities were built up with sections within which unnamed streets were laid.
Simple address systems were convenient within cities, but long-distance and international departures became a real problem - it is not clear how to write the address so that the postman understands it. Still such letters went for a long time and were often lost.
From the middle of the 19th century, postal codes began to appear in the world. They were first introduced in Liverpool and London, later in the USA. There was no centralized world system of indices, each country invented its own.
So over time, the usual system of addresses has developed, from the index, city address and last name. It preserved the historical overlay layers: from modern postal inventions to the ancient indication of the name.
But this system is not perfect.
Addresses are not universal
In each country, the address is written in its own way. It is not so easy to take and write the address correctly, so that you are clearly understood (well, if you don’t write from Moscow to Minsk, of course).
All this can be considered a little strange, which fans of letters like so much, but these oddities make life very difficult for people and companies all over the world. It is difficult to imagine a larger Kluge than the international address system.
They are language dependent.
As we have said, the address is strongly tied to the language. Billions of people have difficulty with English, and not necessarily in any Malaysia.
If you send a letter with an English-language address from a Russian city, it is likely that it will not be able to read it and return it back to you. The author of these lines regularly encounters such situations and always duplicates the English-language address in Russian.
In addition, the postman at the place of receipt of the letter may also not read the address in English.
They are not attached to man
The biggest misfortune of addresses is that they indicate a geographical place: a house, an apartment, an office.
If you move from Moscow to Petersburg, the letter will not reach. If you go on a two-month business trip to the United States, the letter will lie in a box or in the mail (in the latter case, it will go back).
Despite the fact that the address is not tied to the person, he remains very personal, sometimes excessively. This is not just an indication of the mailbox, it is the address where we live. Many people are afraid to give their address - it seems that it is not difficult to track a person and do something bad.
There are projects in the world that improve the address system, such as Geohash and Mapcode . However, they are difficult for users and do not solve all problems.
Obviously, we need a new address system, which:
In addition, in such a system is to add an element of magical cloud technologies.
We in Dadat imagine that the addresses of the future should look like this:
R8L9Y7P2Z3 is a unique postal code that people register for themselves.
They do it on a special site. Let's call it address.org for the beauty of the moment. They are registered, enter their address in the traditional form in their native language, and then receive a unique code.
Now you can specify this code instead of the address: just enter it in the field, or write on the envelope. The delivery system or the state postal service will know the code, contact address.org and pick up the usual address from there.
For verification and accuracy, you can specify a surname or a code word - it is not possible to accidentally indicate someone else's code and make several mistakes when writing it. And you can not specify (for anonymity). It is worth embedding the check number check in the number of the postal code, in the manner of the Luna card algorithm . It is also worth refusing from several numbers and symbols that can be confused with each other (B and 8, for example).
The main advantage of the postal code is that the address associated with it can be changed. It is enough to enter your personal account and change it to a new one - the code will remain the same, and the parcels will reach exactly.
It is important that billions of people can use the postal code. Many of them do not use computers and do not know English - they will be given a code in state institutions or will be issued by relatives. It is important that the technology was understood not only by geeks.
Another zip code can protect people with paranoia. You do not want outsiders to find your address? Hide it from the search on address.org and allow only automatic recognition of the real address. Regular hooligans will not be easy to cope with such protection.
⌘ ⌘
The idea of a unique postal code can solve the problem of postal addresses. Of course, it will leave our system for recognizing address errors without work, but this is not so bad - the main thing is that billions of people will be better off.
We will be glad if you criticize it. Where did we go wrong? What are the weak points of the system? Glad to argue with you in the comments.
Today I will tell you why the traditional mailing address system seems to be defective and will offer a "cloudy" way to fix it.
What are postal addresses
The first postal addresses were the names of people. In ancient Persia and India, the cities were small, everyone knew each other personally and remembered who lives where. Later, the cities began to grow, and the address system was not enough.
')
In European countries, addresses are attached to the streets. The streets were given names, and the houses on them
- numbers. In China, Thailand and Japan, cities were built up with sections within which unnamed streets were laid.
Simple address systems were convenient within cities, but long-distance and international departures became a real problem - it is not clear how to write the address so that the postman understands it. Still such letters went for a long time and were often lost.
From the middle of the 19th century, postal codes began to appear in the world. They were first introduced in Liverpool and London, later in the USA. There was no centralized world system of indices, each country invented its own.
So over time, the usual system of addresses has developed, from the index, city address and last name. It preserved the historical overlay layers: from modern postal inventions to the ancient indication of the name.
But this system is not perfect.
What are the usual bad addresses
Addresses are not universal
In each country, the address is written in its own way. It is not so easy to take and write the address correctly, so that you are clearly understood (well, if you don’t write from Moscow to Minsk, of course).
- In Denmark, the address does not indicate the apartment number, but the number of the floor and the side from which the apartment is located (tv - to the left, md - in the center, tf - to the right).
- In Greece, the index is beaten with a space after the third character, and then the name of the city is beaten with two spaces .
- Writing an address in Taiwan depends on whether a letter is sent to China or not, it is written in English, Chinese, or Taiwanese.
- Australia uses a complex system with areas instead of cities and street numbers. Thus, in the state of Victoria, there are only 700 unique addresses per 8,000 settlements.
- In Ireland, they use their own system of Irekod indices - in it they encode not only the city and the district, but also a quarter.
- Hong Kong does not use indexes at all.
All this can be considered a little strange, which fans of letters like so much, but these oddities make life very difficult for people and companies all over the world. It is difficult to imagine a larger Kluge than the international address system.
They are language dependent.
As we have said, the address is strongly tied to the language. Billions of people have difficulty with English, and not necessarily in any Malaysia.
If you send a letter with an English-language address from a Russian city, it is likely that it will not be able to read it and return it back to you. The author of these lines regularly encounters such situations and always duplicates the English-language address in Russian.
In addition, the postman at the place of receipt of the letter may also not read the address in English.
They are not attached to man
The biggest misfortune of addresses is that they indicate a geographical place: a house, an apartment, an office.
If you move from Moscow to Petersburg, the letter will not reach. If you go on a two-month business trip to the United States, the letter will lie in a box or in the mail (in the latter case, it will go back).
Despite the fact that the address is not tied to the person, he remains very personal, sometimes excessively. This is not just an indication of the mailbox, it is the address where we live. Many people are afraid to give their address - it seems that it is not difficult to track a person and do something bad.
How to improve email addresses
There are projects in the world that improve the address system, such as Geohash and Mapcode . However, they are difficult for users and do not solve all problems.
Obviously, we need a new address system, which:
- Works well in all countries, free from historical layers.
- Does not depend on the language.
- Indicates a person, not an apartment.
In addition, in such a system is to add an element of magical cloud technologies.
We in Dadat imagine that the addresses of the future should look like this:
R8L9Y7P2Z3 is a unique postal code that people register for themselves.
They do it on a special site. Let's call it address.org for the beauty of the moment. They are registered, enter their address in the traditional form in their native language, and then receive a unique code.
Now you can specify this code instead of the address: just enter it in the field, or write on the envelope. The delivery system or the state postal service will know the code, contact address.org and pick up the usual address from there.
For verification and accuracy, you can specify a surname or a code word - it is not possible to accidentally indicate someone else's code and make several mistakes when writing it. And you can not specify (for anonymity). It is worth embedding the check number check in the number of the postal code, in the manner of the Luna card algorithm . It is also worth refusing from several numbers and symbols that can be confused with each other (B and 8, for example).
The main advantage of the postal code is that the address associated with it can be changed. It is enough to enter your personal account and change it to a new one - the code will remain the same, and the parcels will reach exactly.
It is important that billions of people can use the postal code. Many of them do not use computers and do not know English - they will be given a code in state institutions or will be issued by relatives. It is important that the technology was understood not only by geeks.
Another zip code can protect people with paranoia. You do not want outsiders to find your address? Hide it from the search on address.org and allow only automatic recognition of the real address. Regular hooligans will not be easy to cope with such protection.
⌘ ⌘
The idea of a unique postal code can solve the problem of postal addresses. Of course, it will leave our system for recognizing address errors without work, but this is not so bad - the main thing is that billions of people will be better off.
We will be glad if you criticize it. Where did we go wrong? What are the weak points of the system? Glad to argue with you in the comments.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/307410/
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