Data Cleanup

[pabney]

It has come to my attention that I will be learning a bit about mailing in our company. I know what our mail person currently uses to work on data (a very very old dos version of foxpro), and I am sure there is something else a bit better on cleaning up mail data. What are you using, and why?
He uses PostalSoft for cass and to ncoa, which I have yet learned about. Does this software offer some type of data scrubbing?

Thanks
Paul

[pcmodem]

We use Mail Manager from BCC Software for CASS and NCOA. Data scrubbing is a very vague term. CASS could be counted as data scrubbing since it standardizes addressing and validates addresses against the USPS database.

Perhaps you can tell us more of what this ver very old dos program does and we maybe able to help.

[pabney]

It seems Foxpro is being used or things like de-duping names, separating data into fields (such as from name field to firstname field, lastname field), removing non printing characters and other normal database stuff. Now normally I would just use Filemaker Pro for doing database work, but was hoping there was something out there that is made specifically for this type of work. Maybe something that can use regular expressions, or is already programed to look for Smith, John or John Smith in the same field.

(edit) I just notice another post you answered about what you called house holding, that would be something also I would be interested in.

Paul

[youston]

We use an application called Personator to do a lot of this type of thing:

Personator - Maintain personalized mailing lists and combine data from different sources with this data management tool

It will open up your MS Access db (or other varieties), make a number of adjustments, and save changes. It's a really handy tool.

[pcmodem]

Mail Manager is able to handle the removal of Non-Printing characters, Splitting Full Name into Prefix-First-Middle-Last-Suffix, De-duping, Mixed Case Properly names like McDonald, and many more features. Not to mention it also handles all of the Postal CASS, NCOA and presorting.