Today I ran into a concerning issue: supporters had been submitting contributions—but their addresses were either not saved, or worse, wiped out entirely for existing contacts in CiviCRM.
After a couple rounds of debugging, it turns out, it was tied to the USPS address validation integration in CiviCRM. These sites, on a CiviCRM multisite, had signed up for the USPS Web Tools API address validation back in 2017. Turns out these accounts “Provider service user ID” got deleted or otherwise broke the CRM functionality and the upshot on this system was that it wiped out the address.
Not great—especially for campaign organizations that need to report donor addresses to state elections offices.
It turns out the USPS integration currently used by CiviCRM is being deprecated. From USPS:
“The Web Tools API platform will be retired on January 25, 2026. To avoid any service disruptions, migrate to the new USPS APIs.”
So there’s the issue. I temporarily resolved this by adding the national organization’s USPS account and setting an override in the civicrm.settings.php file—just in case other sites on the network haven’t reported it, yet.
Stepping back, these sites were already using some address normalization:
- The Geocoder extension via Google or OpenStreetMap helps auto-fill city, state, and county fields
- CiviCRM partner Cividesk offers an CiviDesk Normalize extension standardizes formatting—like uppercasing addresses—but doesn’t fill in missing data
Here’s the thing:
If you’re using the USPS integration, it’s worth double-checking that it’s working. Just go into the back-end of Civi and try saving an address.
And honestly, with Google’s geocoding doing a lot of the heavy lifting, you might not even need USPS validation anymore.
But—if you do rely on it for exact formatting, there’s a way you can help. The USPS integration in CiviCRM needs to be rebuilt to use the new API. It could turn into a “Make It Happen” campaign waiting for various organizations to fund it.