Since I read on macOSXHints that everyone in the USA is shopping for teletubbie dolls today, it’s a good time to post things with a more international flavour.

Annard Brouwer has written an Address Book plugin that provides look-ups for European addresses through the ViaMichelin map service.

They may well be more accurate than other mapping services and come with pretty scaled images of significant landmarks:

Installation is easy. Download the script from Annard’s web site and place the plugin in your ~/Library/Address Book Plug-Ins folder.

Restart Address Book and you will see a “Via Michelin map of …” option in the contextual menu that appear when you click on the label of a European address.

Other plugins exist which do something similar for European addresses and you can find them in the Address Book section of this site’s plugin list.

[Thanks, Annard]address book, maps, Michelin, contacts, Europe

Brian Toth has updated his series of Google Maps plugins for Address Book.

The new version (2.4) comes in a beta 3 for PPC Macs and beta 2 for Intel Macs.

Initial support for addresses in some European Countries — Italy, Germany and France and perhaps Spain — has been added to the existing support for United States, UK, Canadian and Japanese addresses.

The new betas also feature a preference pane that allows you set a default location and various other options in the way addresses are parsed:

The plugins are donation-ware and are available from his web site .

[Via TUAW ]address book, plugins, Google maps, europe

Anti-virus and anti-spam company Sophos has released its latest spam report , which covers the origin and replaying of spam for the first quarter of 2006.

According to the report, the USA accounted for over half of all spam sent to the world two years ago, but now it sends less than a quarter. The improvement is attributed to the CAN-SPAM Act and to successful US prosecutions of spammers.

Increasing amounts of spam sent from other parts of the world also help the USA’s percentage of the total to fall. Europe in particular has seen substantial increases.

Asia remains the king of spam-relaying.

You can read a summary of the report with graphs on the Sophos web site.email, spam, USA, CAN-SPAM, Europe