Perfect source for Postal Codes Info and Downloads

Not all localized versions of Dynamics NAV contain the list of postal codes and often you want to add postal codes of different countries to one database of company.

I searched more than once for good lists or import files but they are hard to find and almost never free. Until I found the following site which has daily dumps of postal codes for most countries and for free on top of that.

http://www.geonames.org/postal-codes/

The site has a lot of info about the format of postal codes, perfect if you want to validate postal codes that are entered in the application. Some usefull maps showing which area/county/province has which postal codes and a bunch of links to sites with more info.

But the most interesting are of course the daily dumps of postal codes, flat files with all postal codes of most countries. You can find the daily dump here:

http://download.geonames.org/export/zip/

All this is free so if you use their files a lot I would suggest making a donations, I guess everything helps, even the small bits and hey where else are you going to find all this for free?

http://www.geonames.org/donations.html

Be aware that the Data is provided “as is” without warranty or any representation of accuracy, timeliness or completeness. It is licensed under a creative commons BY license. This means you can use the dump as long as you give credit to GeoNames (a link on your website to www.geonames.org is ok) : http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/.