Mods, please feel free to move this wherever seems more appropriate (or even copy to the Snail Mail thread)...

Here is a great website that gives advice on how to format postal addresses for countries other than your own. For instance I've only found out from here that the USPS decodes UK as Ukraine rather than the United Kingdom

It may be of use for those venturing outside their own turf, even if only by post...

Interesting read, though I tend to think the best way to get an address correct to write it just as the buyer has done. They are the local area experts and will know of changes long before an unofficial website gets updated.

True, but if I tell one of the guys I'm buying from that I live in the UK (which is our convention) and my pen ends up in Ukraine then the seller has just followed my flawed instructions.

Then again, I would get stung less by customs...

I'm not surprised that the US Postal Service does that thing which is remarkably uncommon and counter-intuitive by very regulation. If I were to send something to "Covent Garden, London, England, UK," it would end up at Chernobyl no doubt.

And the Canada info at that website, I see, perpetuates the annoyingly inept system which that country uses. I used to live at (if I remember correctly) house number 224 on the street named after Saint George, in apartment 501. According to officialdom, mail to me was supposed to be addressed as:

501-224 St. George St.

Some business outfits would automatically use the above format (for example, my car insurance company) while others would use the more sensible:

224 Saint George Street
Apartment #501

Roughly once each month I received a large package of misdelivered mail from 501 George Street, and another one from 501 St. George Street, each of which had an apartment number 224 in it. You'd think the postal service itself would realize that putting one number in front of another number is a recipe for ambiguity but they persisted. Idiots.

I am beginning to believe that government-sponsored postal services deliberately create systems that are designed to fail, just so that they can justify hiring further numbers of employees.

What percentage of citizens of the United States of America do you guess could not identify the location of "The United Kingdom" ?
(More correctly known as The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland....that might give 'em a clue, but who's gonna write all that?)

We often can't even get it right even within our own coastline. A letter to The Times from me last Christmas...

USPS site on international addressing specifies that country name must stand alone on last line, spelled out in full (no abbreviation) in English, preferably all caps. Basically that is the only line used in the country it is mailed from; everything else should follow format of the "mail to" country.

I think that the link originally posted by "I am not a number" includes flawed information in places. For example, for Finland it includes FIN-012345 as a correct way of registering the postal code. This is incorrect. In international mail, it should be FI-012345. The ISO 3166 / Alpha-2 standard provides for two-letter country codes.

Incidentally, for the United Kingdom the correct code would be GB (and for Ukraine, UA).

A great resource is the Universal Postal Union (main page). The above country codes were picked up from UPU's this sub-page.

/Tojusi

Thanks for the info and the link. I had the unfortunate experience of sending the same package 4x to Canada because of an address format issue. There was also an issue of someone misreading the "A" as "4" on the alphanumeric postal code. The concept of alphanumeric postal codes is lost on septics in the mail room. I finally had to resort to sending it via FedEx (and re-typing the postal code in huge fonts in my instructions) so there would be more returns. The package finally arrived in Canada, albeit nearly 6-weeks after initial dispatch.

Here's the reference I've used:

FRANK'S COMPULSIVE GUIDE TO POSTAL ADDRESSES

-- Brian

My solicitors will be in touch.

Gives up, goes home...

The USPS actually requires the full country name to be spelled out only in upper case letters. Abbreviations are not acceptable.

The would quickly handle the UK Ukraine issues.

Tony

Did you want them returned again?
My better half and I received the nicest Christmas pressies in January from girlieg33k. Ta muchly again Kate!!!

Never been much of an "expert" on the postal service, but I've never lost a package in the mail going or coming... Including such far flung places as Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and the US, as well as home (Canada).

That said, I ALWAYS write out the country in full in BIG letters, at least TWICE as prominent as the rest of the address. The address format I do my best to match the way it was presented to me by a native of that country. Postal codes are put with the "local" part of the address, not following the country as I have seen some do.

Of course now I've said that, I'm going to have a whole spate of parcels lose their way...