The Early Warning System (EWS) provides up-to-date address information for new and recently changed addresses that have not yet been updated in the monthly USPS database. EWS prevents address records from miscoding due to a delay in postal data reaching the USPS® databases.
The older the U.S. Postal Database, the higher potential you have for miscoding addresses. When a valid address is miscoded because the address it matches to in the U.S. Postal Database is inexact, it will result in a broken address.
EWS data consists of partial address information limited to the ZIP Code™, street name, predirectional, postdirectional, and a suffix. For an address record to be EWS-eligible, it must be an address not present on the most recent monthly production U.S. Postal Database.
When you validate an address, the address is assigned an EWS code in the EWS field. The EWS codes are:
- Y
- The address was found in the EWS data.
- N
- The address was not found in the EWS data.