Data mining town and city names

I want to be able to create a full list of cities and towns for any given country.

I have been looking at the google maps api, but it seems to not be suited f开发者_运维百科or the purpose given that it doesn't return enough results for a given query and a there is no way to ask for the "next" results for the query as far as I can tell. It is however clear that google maps does contain the information I am looking for, the matter is getting to it.

The source doesn't need to be google maps, of course. Bing maps etc could also be a possibility. Any ideas?

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Some of the 'Postal Comapanies' web sites for each country contain downloaded Post Code/Zip tables. This would be the easiest place to start searching.

http://www.foreign-trade.com/resources/country-code.htm may also be a good start for some countries.

For Australia : http://auspost.com.au/products-and-services/download-postcode-data.html