I get enough physical letter spam that it would be a consideration. I don’t get a lot of email spam.
Or maybe not. Why couldn’t you just give your real address to them? I can see arguments for applying the same logic to pizza delivery but the argument is not as compelling.
In fact, the main reason for portable email addresses doesn’t really apply to posted letters (or pizzas) at all.
Maybe look it up yourself. If you are going to give access to all couriers / courier companies / pizza delivery / other delivery and collection companies / … and all hackers, isn’t it a forlorn hope that the information would remain confidential?
Businesses and all other entities that are not natural persons e.g. incorporated companies, partnerships, trusts, associations, not-for-profits, other incorporated entities, government agencies and departments.
Pets?
Then you get complications like … I want to post a letter of complaint to my local MP. My local MP does not want to give out his or her own Australia Card id and receive the snail mail at home ‘forever’, long after retirement. So the MP needs a separate identity as it relates to the role of MP (and the mail may then go to the electorate office or the office in Canberra or direct to the recycling centre or whatever the MP configures).
Another minor consideration is how much redundancy is in the Australia Card id. When I give a normal postal address there is a lot of redundancy so that many errors will be detected and delivery may even succeed when the postal address is wrong. If I give a 9 digit number but I make an error or it is incorrectly recorded then delivery can go wildly wrong. (So I am suggesting a minimum of 1 check digit for a total of 10 digits but better 2 check digits for a total of an 11 digit number. Like an ABN. But that may only cater for humans. So best to add one more character.)
Well, yes. It would be hard to justify inventing a new system for lifetime letter delivery when most senders don’t want to use letters at all and when it is probably in terminal decline.
And this would be harder than postcodes? In fact it would be a lot easier, because there would be no need for manual sorting to match the delivery route - sorting could be completely automated.
Makes sense.
As is currently the case both with email and snail mail.
I am beginning to regret calling it the Australia Card. That was very tongue in cheek. As for the question, simply include a checksum in the number, in the same way that credit card and tax file numbers have a trailing digit or digits that check everything preceding. This only helps if you are entering your number into a system, but is at least a start. Alternatively, teach modulus 11 calculation to all schoolchildren.
An even easier check would be to make sure each issued number is divisible by three. If a number is divisible by three, then the sum of its component digits is also divisible by three, and the sum of the sum of those is divisible by three. So:
147822 is divisible by three because 1+4+7+8+2+2 = 24 and 2+4 = 6 is divisible by three.
There will occasionally be a need to change your number, and it would be roughly equivalent to updating credit card details - except that with your postal number you could put an auto-forward into the system for six or twelve months so you know who is still using the old address that you would like to provide with the new one.
I did not intend to hijack this thread about email portability - this was just something I considered at a very broad level a year or two ago in relation to physical mail.
Oops. Someone is dyslexic and reverses the 2s to 5s. You end up with a digit sum of 30, and single digit of 3.
An interesting maths trick, and dividing by 9 is the same, but no good for error detection.
