[OT] Map of email origins to Python list

[Claire McLister]

On Nov 7, 2005, at 10:23 AM, Rocco Moretti wrote:

> It's also a testament to the limited value of physically locating 
> people
> by internet addresses - If you zoom in on the San Fransico bay area, 
> and
> click on the southern most bubble (south of San Jose), you'll see the
> entry for the Mountain View postal code (94043) - a massive list which
> contains mostly gmail.com accounts, but also contains accounts with .de
> .ca .uk .pl .it .tw and .za domains. I doubt all of the people in that
> list live in sunny California, let alone in Mountain View proper.
>

Indeed, locating people from IP is not that easy or correct. We are, 
however, not trying to suggest that we can find people's locations this 
way. We are just trying to pin-point the origins of emails to a group.

The flaw that you point out is due to problems in our approach of how 
we find the 'origin' IP.

We try to get a best guess estimate of the originating IP and its 
location. If we cannot find that, we fall back on the earliest server 
that has a location information. Clearly this marks quite a few email 
origins in the wrong way. It doesn't do the collection of ALL gmail 
addresses this way, however. If you do a filter on 'gmail' in the 
'Name' filter, you'll see a lot of gmail addresses all over the world. 
So, we need to do a better job of guessing the originating IP, and not 
try to go too far forward.