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Guidelines: Achieving the Postal Look

Important! For the most complete and up-to-date USPS information, see the USPS website, the USPS Domestic Mail Manual, or your USPS postal representative.

The US Postal Service prefers that your addresses have the following characteristics:

Use all capital letters.
Remove all punctuation.
For domestic mail, use the official two-letter state abbreviations.

For reference, see the USPS list of state abbreviations.
For domestic mail, use the ZIP+4 for each address.
For domestic mail, print the city, state, and ZIP Code on the last line of the address.
- Note: Do not include United States, the United States of America, USA, or US in domestic mailing addresses!
For domestic mail, print the street address on the second-to-last line of the address.
For domestic mail, use abbreviations for street types (for example, Dr instead of Drive). For more information, see USPS Street Suffixes.
For international mail, print the country name on the last line of the address.
- Note: Be careful how you spell the name of the country. For more information, see Display a List of Countries.

For examples of domestic and international address formats, see Guidelines: Address Formats.

DAZzle can do all of this for you. However, most of these recommendations are not needed if you barcode your mailpiece with DAZzle. The US Postal Service guidelines are made so that their OCR equipment can read your envelope and print a barcode on it. If you have already barcoded your envelope or label, the processing of your mailpiece skips the OCR process.