2 Comments
User's avatar
Bob's avatar

I've emailed you, since mine was not found. I'm curious as to why you'd use an OCR software to go through Emails, when you could either just use a tiny piece of software to extract the individual email information from the emails or actually use macOS built-in features to get the text strings from any form of electronic picture (even with third-party apps like TextSniper).

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David Bureš's avatar

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is any software that can recognize text in a picture. This includes the OCR system that macOS has built-in, and TextSniper is also OCR software.

Computers are pretty bad at recognizing some characters or sequences of characters (for example, they think "rn" might be "m", or that 0 (zero) is O).

In order to preserve user privacy, I don't store the emails of anyone who bought Cork. In order to get to this information at all, I had to request access to the database the payment provider has, which couldn't be exported, again due to privacy rules. So I had to take screenshots of the emails, and then run them through the OCR to get any usable data out of it.

So this is the reason why some emails didn't work properly, even if it was a pretty small percentage. Sometimes, a lowercase L turns into an uppercase i, and then the emails don't match.

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