On Sun, 7 Feb 2010 16:43:29 -0800 (PST), Mizter T
wrote:


On Feb 7, 10:57*pm, Tom Anderson wrote:

On Sat, 6 Feb 2010, Mizter T wrote:
There was one company I had recent online dealings with that didn't have
any sort of London option at all - I'm quite sure a good many Londoners
wouldn't be too sure of their 'historic' county, for example how many
know exactly where ye olde dividing line between Kent and Surrey lay?
I've got a broad idea, but that's only coz I've looked it up on maps of
yore.

Given that the post office doesn't pay any attention to the county,
couldn't you fill in whatever you liked?

You could - it'd be an interesting test of the extent to which Royal
Mail doesn't pay *any* attention whatsoever to a county that's given
as part of an address! I dare say one might find that helpful
interventions might be made... one can test it for the price of a few
stamps, and perhaps some strange looks from your postman, I suppose
(that said mass produced mail from mailing houses might be treated
with more tolerance for absurd address elements than evidently
personally addressed mail). There's still a good number of postman who
do give a damn.

Putting the wrong county could have an affect if the OCR fails to
recognise the postcode but reads enough of the rest to produce a
unique match to an existing address which is not the intended
destination but not enough to exclude wrong addresses which would have
been ignored if the correct county was shown.