List Hygiene — ABCs of Improving Address Quality

An address like “3rd Street & Main Street” may get delivered, but it’s not going to get a ZIP+4. As the Postal Service strives to identify bad addresses further upstream, addresses like these may become less deliverable.

The USPS also offers some tools for enhancing non-ZIP+4 addresses. One service is called Address Element Correction (AEC). With AEC, the Postal Service will match your non-ZIP+4 addresses against its own in-house database with some advanced software that can do things CASS software cannot. The results are not always wonderful, as the system often goes to default values that may inhibit delivery.