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When I input my address in the 'Your Contact Information' section of the ESTA application form (for a visa waiver for entry into the United States), I repeatedly get a "Address Validation: Invalid Street Name". It doesn't matter what I put in the field, it doesn't accept it. My street number and name are not particularly odd-looking (no non-ASCII characters etc.).

Sam Wilson
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    We would really like to know the street name you put in, so we can give an answer that is a bit more than just "brute force" – 8192K Sep 03 '18 at 09:46
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    I don't think that it's a problem of invalid characters. It looks like they perform geolocation: that is, they look up your address on Google Maps or something like that to check if it's a real one. So I would guess that they could not place your home address on a map and hence it's possible that a human will have to give a second look at your application. – Federico Poloni Sep 03 '18 at 10:25
  • Does the address you are trying to use validate using the U.S. Postal Service ZIP code lookup? https://tools.usps.com/zip-code-lookup.htm?byaddress – Martin Burch Sep 03 '18 at 11:36
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    @MartinBurch I’d doubt it: if OP is applying to get into the US, his contact information isn’t going to be in the US. – Robin Whittleton Sep 03 '18 at 11:52
  • @RobinWhittleton ah, yes, I see. I got that confused with the U.S. Point of Contact section of ESTA (in Part 3, Travel Information) which is expecting a US address. – Martin Burch Sep 03 '18 at 12:10
  • @MartinBurch And the US contact address doesn't actually ask for a ZIP code. – David Richerby Sep 03 '18 at 12:23
  • Other countries have post offices tool. Point is, if CBP is using an address validator, that means the validator exists for that country and probably has a public UI somewhere. Go to that validator. – Harper - Reinstate Monica Sep 03 '18 at 22:51
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    I didn't add the actual address I used, because I tried with a few different variations (even looking up how USPS would format it etc.), and even with an address from the next street over (just to see if it worked; I would've gone back and changed it if it had of course). But nothing worked. I suspect it's just that whatever address validator they're using doesn't have my suburb? Or maybe was just failing on everything at that moment in time (e.g. upstream service offline or something). Anyway, brute force works! – Sam Wilson Sep 04 '18 at 00:20
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    Whoever coded that site ought to read falsehoods programmers believe about addresses A large portion of the world does not even have street names (including 1st world countries, like Japan) – Mawg says reinstate Monica Sep 04 '18 at 14:36

1 Answers1

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Just keep clicking retry, and eventually, after a dozen tries, it will give you the option of accepting the address anyway and continuing:

Verification checkbox

Sam Wilson
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    @ROIMaison He didn't come back. He already knew the answer and posted it at exactly the same time as the question. It was never unanswered. – pipe Sep 03 '18 at 14:58
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    @pipe, he still took the time to come back to Travel.SE from the ESTA application form to inform the rest of the world about this issue and how to resolve it by posting it as a Q&A. – RyanfaeScotland Sep 03 '18 at 16:02
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    It's true, I posted the answer at the same time as the question. It was just because I'd spent 20 minutes worrying that I wouldn't be able to submit the ESTA application, and wanted to post the info somewhere useful! :-) – Sam Wilson Sep 04 '18 at 00:17
  • what if this was something that doesn't normally happen and was just a random temporary problem in the website? – user13267 Sep 04 '18 at 02:26
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    I don't think they'd have an override checkbox if it wasn't anticipated. But it's a good point. Still, this seems to have gotten lots of upvotes so maybe people think it's useful! – Sam Wilson Sep 04 '18 at 03:02
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    @user13267 That seems unlikely. It is a common and inevitable problem with sites that rely on address verification that eventually a user will come along with a valid entry that is not "on the list" (e.g. a new street). The option to manually override it was clearly deliberately designed in this case. – JBentley Sep 04 '18 at 16:09
  • @SamWilson question went hot, has an amusing answer == lots of upvotes (so the number of upvotes no longer has any meaningful relation to how many people find it useful) – muru Sep 05 '18 at 04:19