On Fri, 22 Jan 2016 03:30:05 -0800, aurora wrote:

On Fri, 22 Jan 2016 09:14:43 +0000, Roland Perry
wrote:

In message
-sept
ember.org, at 08:42:10 on Fri, 22 Jan 2016, Recliner
remarked:
The Royal Mail dropped county names from addresses years ago.

Yes, but too many web forms still make it a mandatory field, probably
because they were originally designed to collect US addresses.

Not literally so, because US addresses don't include the county. In
general they are shorter than UK addresses, only having Street, Town,
State (universally abbreviated) and Zipcode.

For example, Microsoft is: One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA, 98052-7329.
No mention at all of King County.

One would have expected Nigel to have known that.

Is there any postal authority that still uses counties, or their
functional equivalent?

An Post; Japan Post if you count prefectures as equivalent to
counties.
As a consequence of ignoring counties it seems if you want to find the
postcode to 1 High Street, Sutton in RM's address/postcode finder then
you're buggered if you don't have native knowledge of UK geography.