Not an apartment!

March 12, 2015 7:48 AM

The US Postal service has an address standardization/correction service that many companies use. When we put our condo address in as 123A Main Street, it changes it to "123 MAIN ST APT A". Since we don't live in an apartment, is there any way to change that with the USPS so it would be "123 MAIN ST UNIT A" or "123A MAIN ST"?
posted by smackfu to Law & Government (13 answers total)

I've had success actually calling the local post office about something like this. (We're on a wonky corner with either of two different street names that might be seen to go with our house number, and the one that the local government insisted on using was one that the USPS would refuse delivery to. After the call they started delivering to both.)
posted by exogenous at 8:09 AM on March 12, 2015

Unit is a legitimate Secondary Unit Designation, so this should be possible.
posted by rockindata at 8:20 AM on March 12, 2015

If you actually put the address as "123 Main Street Unit A" does it still get corrected to "Apt A," or does that only happen when you use the "123A" form?
posted by primethyme at 8:39 AM on March 12, 2015

Response by poster: No, for our address, it always changes it to APT. I think it must be coded in the master list of addresses that way, because if I use an invalid unit letter, it offers this option:

123 MAIN ST APT (Range A - F)
posted by smackfu at 9:04 AM on March 12, 2015

Is it that your mail carrier will not deliver main to 123A Main St. or that places like Amazon just incorrectly "fix" the address but it gets sent to you anyway? We have a weird thing where our apartment manager decided to change all the apartment numbers, but never told the USPS, so our "correct" address is one the USPS doesn't think exists. But, the mail carrier delivers everything just fine, without any issues, so we have learned to just ignore the issue. Obviously if things are not getting to you, it is a much bigger problem and one to address directly with the Post Office, but absent that, I would just try not worry so much about how the auto-generated address label from Amazon.com looks, unless you really have a lot of extra time on your hands...
posted by rainbowbrite at 11:59 AM on March 12, 2015 [1 favorite]

This will be fairly common, and it's not a USPS thing to fix, it's going to be with all the various companies that send you things, and how their internal databases are configured to accept address data.
Sometimes you'll be able to fill in anything you want, sometimes you'll have multiple choice between Apt / Unit / Bldg, sometimes you'll have to accept whatever coding the shipper is set up for. Because these systems are dumb.

What you're looking at is a case of:
DO: Send to 123 Main st
Reply: FAIL - 123 Main street has multiple occupants. Please Specify Variable
DO: Send to 123 Main St, Condominium A
Reply: FAIL - 'Condominium' is not a variable I recognize. Please Specify Variable
DO: Send to 123 Main St, Unit A
Reply: FAIL - 'Unit' is not a variable I recognize. Please Specify Variable
DO: Send to 123 Main St, # A
Reply: FAIL - '#' is not a variable I recognize. Please Specify Variable
-dammit!- DO: Send to 123 Main St, {variable} A
Reply: Success. Sending to 123 Main St, Apt A. Thank you and have a nice day!

You'll only be able to specify variables that that company's system is set up to use.
If they're non-standard, your address will be non-standard; or if you don't fit the standard, your preferred address will be reshaped to fit the standard and you have no choice in that.

I wouldn't worry about it, though.
The human being who's actually delivering the mail / parcel / pizza / flowers has enough contextual cognition to be able to figure out that 123 Apt A = 123 A = 123 Condo A = 123 Unit A.
It's when things start getting delivered by drones that you'll have to start worrying about this.
posted by bartleby at 12:43 PM on March 12, 2015

Response by poster: I understand each company may have our address down differently. But the USPS is one of the people who have this logic, for instance on their ZIP lookup website: "You can also enter a street address and ZIP Code™ to get a standardized version of the address." And that's the one I would like to fix, ideally.
posted by smackfu at 1:01 PM on March 12, 2015

Oh, I see.
I've just tried your link and entered several different variations of a known address, and most of those variations come up as valid - 123|space|A, 123A, 123 #A, etc. But when I put in 123Q, I get this (because there's no such place):
"The address you provided is not recognized by the US Postal Service as an address we serve. Mail sent to this address may be returned."
The address I used has been there for decades, and I bet that over time, the various possible formattings and mispellings have gotten rejected, complained about, and validated by some mechanism.
I bet if you went into your local PO and found someone to complain to (the local Postmaster?), about your official address of record not being recognized as an address served by the USPS, they could get it entered into 'the system' as a recognized address variation.
posted by bartleby at 2:15 PM on March 12, 2015

Vaguely related: my apartment is theoretically 1234A Somestreet. I have found that way too many people and pieces of software leave off the "A", which is pretty important. I've taken to writing Apt A all the time now, and I would recommend sticking to Apt A or Unit A.
posted by Brassica oleracea at 3:15 PM on March 12, 2015

If it's possible, it's going to be far more work than it's worth. (Seriously, what difference does it make if it says Apt A or Unit A? I think my dorm room was officially Apt F7-50AC.) There was a guy who lived down the road from us when I was growing up who lived on a corner and wanted to change his address to the other street (god knows why). He failed.

Anyway, addresses are assigned by some local government entity. See here if you happened to live in Prince William County, VA. That makes it sound like that's where the secondary unit designator is chosen as well, rather than by USPS. It strikes me as improbable you could change one unit without changing the entire building.
posted by hoyland at 5:03 PM on March 12, 2015

Best answer: There are a bunch of different address-validation products on the market. I think that most of the big ones hit the USPS Delivery Point Verification API, directly or indirectly. So if you really want to change your "correct" address as returned by software, that is where you want to change it. (A lot of commercial products seem to take the master data file from the USPS and then wrap their own APIs and software around it, so it could potentially take a while for a change made to the USPS master database to trickle down to every user of the various pieces of address-correction software.)

Oddly, for an organization that loves forms, there doesn't seem to be a form around for correcting bad DPV/AMS data. That makes me think that changes have to get into it either automatically via Return To Sender mailpieces triggering an exception process (which is apparently a thing they do; it's discussed in some of the materials for the various USPS offerings), or you have to work through your local post office.

If it were me, I'd probably start by writing a letter (it is the post office, after all, so they are pretty easy to reach by this route) to your local Postmaster and asking them about correcting it. Maybe there is something they can do.

If that doesn't work, I'd consider just taking some random junk mail items that have the "APT" address and sending them back as misaddressed / undeliverable. That might get your address flagged and stop the various systems from correcting your address TO the "APT" one. Although presumably there are mailpieces you don't want to send back which are getting sent to the "wrong" address, and that may undo the flagging / get the address flagged as valid again. But who knows, it might work, depending on how the systems are designed.

Also, I'd try putting your address into various systems in a format other than "123A Main St". That is a format that the USPS hates, because of the way it mixes the street name with the sub-street unit designator, and so software will always try to correct it to something else less deprecated.

Have you tried explicitly entering "123 MAIN ST UNIT A", rather than "123A"? Since it is at least a well-formed address (which "123A" isn't), it might not get given the business by the auto-correcting logic in quite the same way.

Also, you might try "123 MAIN ST STE A" and see if that works. I've found that "STE" (that's "Suite" in postalese) in particular sometimes gets around over-zealous address correction software. (I've used it to successfully create unofficial sub-addresses at a residential address.)
posted by Kadin2048 at 5:33 PM on March 12, 2015

Response by poster: I like the idea of writing a physical letter to the postmaster. As you say, they should be responsive to letters.

And this is all just on principal, that something is wrong in the big USPS machine. We still get mail delivered properly.
posted by smackfu at 7:24 AM on March 13, 2015

My aunt owns and lives in a standalone house on its own lot. It's not an apartment, it's not a condo, it's not a townhouse, it's not connected to any other dwelling and there's a wall around the property. It even has its own separate garage building. Her street address number is 504A Elm St, but USPS insists that it be "standardized" to 504 Elm St Apt A. Sheesh!
posted by Kajaro at 9:11 AM on May 16, 2015