USPS Recommendations

In USPS Postal Addressing Standards (Publication 28), the USPS presents a few general guidelines for maintaining and managing address lists. Proper management of mailing lists will help ensure that addresses in your database are accurate and complete. SmartyStreets offers customers solutions that will assist with address data management. We recommend updating addresses in your list using our SmartyStreets Scrubbing services in order to meet these maintenance recommendations:

Delivery address information should be stored in a minimum of 30 bytes or spaces in your computer system. The optimum recommendation is 64 bytes or spaces.

Addresses should be updated in the address list after they have been matched against the address information files.

Organizations should establish list management procedures for their address databases.

New addresses should go through a standardization and verification process before being added to the master address list.

Review the output of the addresses on mailpieces, inserts or labels to ensure that the address is machine readable and able to be processed on optical character readers (OCRs).

Print complete address information on mailpieces and eliminate extra information.