>I was wondering if anybody here has implemented Address Verifications and can make a recommendation ?
>
>I have done some research and have found out our possible options are;
>
>- Purchase Online Database Service and pay per use (for all customers who signup).
>
>- Buy the Data (on regular basis because of frequent updates) and install it on our own Server.
>Customer station will call our Server online. No Pay Per Use fees. But instead need to pay for the Data and Server Maintenance.
>
>- Customer buys the CD for each station (on regular basis), installs it, and then our App does a "LOCAL" call via DDE / DLLs.
>(nothing online - No Pay Per Use fees, no costs on our part - customer buys updates directly from the Data Vendor).

If you ever bought anything online, you'd have noticed that your address may have been reformatted, and may have the additional four digits in the zip code. That's when you buy from a website which uses address verification, which was, in my experience, more than half of them.

Having considered such an option on one of the gigs, I did some research, but that was years ago. Basically, the good old USPS has such a service, and anyone else is just repackaging what USPS sells. If it was any other way around, my address in the US (a weird one, with a dash in the house number, and a street name which is spelled as two words at one end of the street, and as one word at the other) would at least once come back reformatted differently, but it didn't. It was either the USPS format, or verbatim what I typed.

So I guess your best bet is to check with usps.com, I think they had all the options you listed, and they seem to issue quarterly updates to the database, or you can subscribe to a web service and have your app check addresses on the fly. It may not be so nowadays, this is what I remember from few years ago.