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When I talked with Melissa Data's Jack Schember, he told me, "Melissa Data makes data quality management affordable for all businesses, not just for high-end enterprise companies. Internet retailers can start their own data quality project using Melissa Data's extensive tools and applications for less than the cost of a laptop."

He shared with me some tidbits that are very interesting, especially if you think about the free resources available on the lookup page:

• The cost of bad data to businesses in the U.S. is in the neighborhood of $600 billion per year according to the Data Warehousing Institute.

• UPS charges $5 for each incorrect delivery address that they have to correct in the field. If you use some form of address verification before shipment, you can conceivably save a ton of cash.

• Here's a creepy thought for the paranoid: what if someone's looking up information about you? Jack tells us that Melissa Data offers a free service that will alert you if someone tries to look up your address on the Melissa Data server.

• 17% of Americans move each year, according to the United States Postal Service; Also, the average American moves 11 times in a lifetime. So far, I've moved 8 times. That means I've got three more to go: Florida, Hawaii, Fiji. I got goals!

• From 10% to 40% of all name and address errors occur at the time of the initial data entry.

Although most of us initially think of Outlook as an email program, many of you use it to manage all your addresses in the real world as well as the virtual world. If you're going to be physically sending items, it might be quite useful to give these statistics some serious thought.

Diane Poremsky is the president of CDOLive LLC and a Microsoft Outlook MVP. She's author of Teach Yourself Outlook 2003 in 24 Hours (Sam's, 2003) and coauthor of OneNote 2003 for Windows (Visual QuickStart Guide). For questions or suggestions for future columns, write her at outlook@cdolive.com.