Re: [Evolution-hackers] Dynamically fetching city, state info from zip codes

[Not Zed <notzed ximian com>]

On Fri, 2004-03-05 at 11:29 -0600, Caleb Groom wrote:

> On Fri, 2004-03-05 at 11:18, Dan Winship wrote:
> > You should probably check that the information isn't already freely
> > available somewhere else.
> > 
> > At any rate, I'm pretty sure there are freely-usable SOAP services on
> > the web that evo could use.
> 
> I have checked.  Try a quick google and you will find pages and pages of
> commercial companies selling the same thing.  I'd love to find free/Free
> access to this information.  Since I don't seem to be able to I thought
> I'd try to rally the troops. :)
> 
> Re: SOAP, this data is rather static, I was thinking the gathered data
> could be hard coded like the country listings in Evolution.

There are a lot of postcodes in a lot of countries out there.  Creating
and updating the list would be a major undertaking.  I also wouldn't be
surprised if the australian postcode list (for example) was copyright
Australia Post or something, and hence unusable without some agreement.
Well surprise surprise, i looked it up, and it is.  The zip file of the
database is also 100K in size.

It would be pretty useless for most of the world if it only did
postcodes for the usa (e.g. for me :).