On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 10:40 AM, Stefano Mazzocchi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> 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[...]
>
> 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.


Well, there's the 80% (ok, 60%?) solution which would be to scan for a vcard
or regex the last few lines of uncommented/indented text for something that
"looks like" an address, and for the many mails that fail to have either of
those, do a very basic TLD->country of origin connection (just seeing which
countries the majority of my email comes from would be ... interesting).

--
> 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
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-- 
Jon Camfield
http://www.JonCamfield.com
MA, Elliott School of International Affairs in International Science and
Technology Policy
RPCV 2002-04, Ministry of Education, Kingston, Jamaica
PGP Key: http://joncamfield.com/pgp.key.txt
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