Question on French & European conventions
Richard Barry
DS>Path: iol!ieunet!Germany.EU.net!howland.reston.ans.net!cs.utexas.edu!asuvax!
>!news.Arizona.EDU!packrat.aml.arizona.edu!dsew
>From: ds...@packrat.aml.arizona.edu (David Sewell)
>Newsgroups: alt.snail-mail
>Subject: Question on French & European postal conventions
>Date: 16 Dec 1994 16:35:50 GMT
>Organization: RADIOCARBON, Dep't of Geosciences, University of Arizona
>Lines: 16
>Message-ID: <3csfl6$7...@news.CCIT.Arizona.EDU>
>NNTP-Posting-Host: packrat.aml.arizona.edu
DS>Two simple questions.
DS>1) What does "CEDEX" stand for as a French postal abbreviation? When
>is it used?
CEDEX means that the postal code is not a regular geographic code, but
one assigned to a corporation, government agency, etc. who receive a
large volume of mail. CEDEX and CODEX are used in various European
countries, and perhaps Latin America also.
DS>2) Who standardizes the use of a country code in front of a numeric
>postal code, e.g. F-25030 Bescancon? Is this an EU convention?
>Should the country codes be used with mail not originating from
>Europe?
Nothing to do with the EU - it is used in Eastern Europe as well as the
West. It a CEPT convention. Many European states have similar
postcode systems eg 25030 could exist in Germany, Sweden, Spain, Italy,
Finland, etc. The UN code is prefixed to the postal code to avoid
confusion. It also eliminates having to write the name of the country,
and overcomes the language difficulties for the country names (eg
Germany, Allemand, Deutschland, etc.) Everyone knows that "D" is
Germany, irrespective of the languages they speak. It also reduces the
size of the mailing address (typically making it one line shorter)
making it faster for OCR systems to read the address.
Richard Barry
IRL-Dublin
rba...@iol.ie
---
ş OLX 2.1 TD ş -
Gerben Vos
> >postal code, e.g. F-25030 Bescancon? Is this an EU convention?
>Nothing to do with the EU - it is used in Eastern Europe as well as the
>West. It a CEPT convention.
Nevertheless, the few times that i have sent mail abroad, the person at the
post office asked me which country i meant, and wrote it below the last line
of the address.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . G e r b e n V o s <><
mailto:ger...@cs.vu.nl http://www.cs.vu.nl/~gerben/
On the Internet, few people know you're an idiot.