>Over the years I have encountered many "standards" for namd and address fields in other systems, and designed many of my own. The desing can vary both in terms of hoo addresses are broken into fields, and the sizes of the fields. For example, in a simple case, one could have Address1 C(30), Address2 (C30), or maybe they should be 35 characters long, or maybe 40 for long addresses. In some cases we may decide to break out the numneric portin of the street address as StreetNumber C(10), AptNummber C(10), StreetName C(30).
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>Names may be broken into first and last, or first, initials, LastName.
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>Emails could be c(40), or maybe this isn't long enough and we need C(70)- so what should the right length be?
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>I would be interested whether there are published guidelines for this - especially in deterermining the optimum lengths so as to be able too hold typical data without making fields too long.

Check http://www.grcdi.com. Owner is one of the gurus in address data management. He published a few books, which I know that is used by Microsoft and MapQuest. We make for him VFP7.0 ADM tools in addition to his books.