[dmschulman]

The post office already offers a lot of the services you described:

"You could specify the to and return adress, you could pay with a credit card, and you could add whatever options you want."

What would the point of obfuscating your address with a 16 digit ID number be? You'd be adding another layer of complexity to an already simple system of names and addresses on a designed letter carrier's route. If you want obscurity you can always register a PO box.

Your solution also relies on other businesses easily and quickly adopting your idea, which in reality is never quick and easy unfortunately.

Truth be told, the mail system isn't perfect, but USPS has done a lot in the last 3-4 years to innovate their own business. I don't have to wait in line anymore because I can print out postage and tape it to my package and leave that at the post office.

Unfortunately a lot of post office customers don't seem to realize the online system exists.

[frasierman]

I totally see where you're coming from, but since the system is mostly automated (as far as I can tell), it'd be just as easy for them to grab from a DB than to try and parse out an adress and postage.

I didn't really start mailing things until the last 3-4 years, so I must admit that I don't know how the system worked previously.

While I agree that it wouldn't be immediately adopted, I don't think it would require too much work on their end to make it work. It's probably naive, and I don't fully understand the system now, so I may be totally wrong, but this was just my idea.

[egypturnash]

Have you ever gotten things in the mail? Even junk mail?

If so, you may have noticed that your mail is ultimately delivered by a human. Someone who has to be able to grab a handful of mail out of their bag and perform a quick visual check that yes, everything in this bundle actually goes to this address. Someone who might have a hundred bundles destined for an apartment building, and would like to be able to quickly parse the addresses to put them into the proper mailbox instead of having to type a long, cryptic ID into a smartphone, and hope they continue to have connectivity.

Any proposed new addressing system also needs to deal with the fact that the postal service serves EVERYONE. Even people way out in the middle of nowhere who have no cellular service. The ONLY processing power available to those mail carriers is their own brain, so it pretty much HAS to be human-readable.

All of the things you complain about in the address are USEFUL redundancy. Including all of that stuff makes it more likely that mail will get to its destination in the event of the ink being smeared (or running due to being rained on). It's more data that's useful in error correction.

Also, if you are mailing out many things and hate copying the info manually, let me introduce you to a concept called "printable address labels" and "mail merge". I recently had to mail out about a hundred books after a successful Kickstarter; I manually addressed maybe three of them. I put books in mailing envelopes, put the labels on the envelopes, sealed them shut, and brought them to the post office. They figured out how much it would cost me to mail them. I paid with a credit card. It really wasn't a major hassle at all.

[wildgift]

This is true. Presently, I don't know my mail carrier, because I moved, but where I grew up, we knew them. If someone mis-addressed a letter, the carrier would deliver it to the right person. They could deliver using the family's name, rather than the address. Back when people hand-addressed personal letters, errors were common.

back in the day, back in the day...

[dmschulman]

Realistically too, the post office is running on a shoestring budget. I don't quite understand their biggest overhead costs (beyond paying out salaries and pension benefits to postal employees) but there has to be a way to make the mail system work the way it's worked but at less cost to tax payers.

[wildgift]

Until this 2006 law that requires the pension to be fully funded for 75 years, and that this be achieved in three more years, the USPS was self sufficient. Postage paid for everything. No cost to the taxpayer. I remember when this was achieved in the 80s - it was on TV. This link has a lot of detail about the USPS.

http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/consumerawareness/a/uspsabout....

[yummyfajitas]

Until this 2006 law that requires the pension to be fully funded for 75 years, and that this be achieved in three more years, the USPS was self sufficient.

Well, self sufficient if you ignore their pension obligations.

The same logic says that if I run a business with $100 in revenue, that pays $50 in cash and $75 in IOUs to suppliers, it's profitable.