Do you love the ability of GoldMine to automatically fill in the city and state when you enter the zipcode but HATE hand-keying 42,000+ zip codes?

I see a request for a good source of zip codes for GoldMine just about once a week on the various support forums. The answers always vary from, “Buy an out-of-date list and import it with out-of-date freeware tools.” to “Tough luck.”

Not being one to accept such things at face value, I googled around a bit and found www.populardata.com where a meticulously maintained comma delimited list of zip codes (with the lat/lon coordinates as well!) is offered for free, direct download with no strings attached — a labor of love, to say the least!

I contacted the maintainer and he was happy to allow me to redistribute the list for free in GoldMine-compatible form. Inspired by his altruism, I proper-cased the city names with BR7 from GoldBox’s site and imported it into a clean GoldMine database. I then made a sync transfer set suitable for retrieval into GoldMine 6.7 (Standard or Corporate Edition.)

The file can be downloaded here.

To import the zip codes, you’ll probably first want to delete the existing zip codes in your current GoldMine database. This may sound simple, but if you synchronize, you’ll need to delete them in a sync-friendly way. This means a tool like GoldBox or a properly written GoldMine API-leveraging program. Whichever way you go, you’ll want to delete the records returned by this query:

select * from lookup where fieldname like '|%'

Obviously, take care when doing this as you could delete the wrong things, importing 42,000+ new lookups will impact remote synchronizers, you may duplicate existing zip code lookups, etc.

For the more technically inclined, you might want to obtain the .TXT file from the Popular Data site and Beyond Gold from DJ Hunt’s site and use the zip code import tool built in there. You’ll end up with all UPPERCASE cities, though, unless you take action to deal with that.

Enjoy!