What online services mail coded postcards for address verification?

Question

At about 24:20 in Stack Overflow Podcast 26 Joel Spolsky said there are services that mail postcards with codes for address verification.

Spolsky: You know what we could have badges for? We could have badges for like: "Real Address". Like I have proven that you live at a certain address.

Atwood: We could.

Spolsky: And then certain things could only be turned on if we can actually go to your house. Not that we will. But we could.

Atwood: We could.

Spolsky: And then you just use one of these--there are these online services that will mail a postcard to an address with a, you know, with a code on it, and if they type it in correctly then you register that they at least control the mail that goes to that address.

What companies offer these services? Have you used one? How was the experience?

Answer 1

You create your "customer list" with addresses and call these guys to get a price for scrubbing your list with mailable addresses. Depending on the amount you will start at $.42 (first class) per piece plus the scrub charge. U.S. only. Valassis - Mailing Services One advantage is they are the biggest in the U.S.

One of the other ways is to do it yourself, which will be first class rates. I've done this for smaller (2500 pieces) runs to contact people for Conferences.

Another way USPS bulk mail is to do "postcards" and following the USPS instructions you can get down to about $.24 per piece.

For verification, usually the person is interested and will respond to the postcard. For the people who asked for a postcard and never received one, that can be a negative on the validity of the address.

You may want to handle P.O. Boxes separately as they exist at the post office and not an actually business or home.

Answer 2

With PostalMethods Web-to-Postal you can send personalized postcards on demand.

Check out the Postal API section to learn how you can quickly integrate your application with PostalMethods' SOAP Web Service and send colorful postcards (and letters) automatically when your user registers to your service.