Jon Camfield wrote: > Awesome tool (now; when do you email server->geolocate->geocode->google > map my inbox? joking. Mostly.)
David and I talked about this. In theory, given a free geoIP dataset (even just a rough one) one could be able to extract the MTA (the mail transport agent, the server that first received the email to be relaied) from the email message headers and then geolocate the message. The problem is that such geolocation is pathetically bad, by design. For example, I live in Los Angeles and use two different MTA's, depending on which 'email persona' I use: one is in Cambridge and the another one is in New York. So, geolocating my email would give you a split persona of two people, one in Cambridge and one in New York, with no indication where I actually was when I sent the email. One could, in theory, toy with the various time zones to at least rule out co-location with their MTA... but still, the granularity is pretty bad. If you have any other idea we're all ears but so far it seems not only hard to execute (no free batch-capable geoip services are available) but even hardly useful, given the data to work from. -- Stefano Mazzocchi Digital Libraries Research Group Research Scientist Massachusetts Institute of Technology E25-131, 77 Massachusetts Ave skype: stefanomazzocchi Cambridge, MA 02139-4307, USA email: stefanom at mit . edu ------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ General mailing list [email protected] http://simile.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/general
