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When did USPS start/stop producing its TIGER/ZIP+4 dataset?
Updates to the product page archived by the WayBack Machine stopped in July 2011, but it looks like some people might have been using it later than that.
I'm trying to figure out the range of years this product would cover if I could get a hold of the old CDs and DVDs.
Unfortunately, the support team for this data product no longer exists.
TIGER is not solely a USPS initiative, it was a collaboration between the U.S. Census Bureau and the USPS. From my recollection, the first release to the public that included a lot of smaller geographic level boundaries was the 2007 edition of TIGER. You can read a general overview in this document. If you've ever heard of the OpenStreetMap (OSM) initiative, they used the 2007 TIGER release for an initial starting point to build out their knowledge of US infrastructures/boundaries.
You can some of the shapefiles here.
I reached the USPS team that used to produce this product. They said they discarded their archives, and the product was discontinued around 2011 because (1) the underlying Census data never seemed to change, and (2) about half of their ZIP+4 codes couldn't be attached to any feature in the Census TIGER files. Dead end.
