How fast email travel

That got me to thinking for some strange reason about the speed in which email and other web traffic travels. Most people including myself up to that point have never given it a lot of thought so I decided to crunch a few numbers and explain it relative to something we are all very familiar with; driving.

Once that email is about to begin its journey from server to server I think it probably turns on some rock and roll, adjusts its seat and mirrors and makes sure it is buckled in nice and tight.

Blinking your eye takes approximately 0. The fastest thing in the universe is the speed of light which is , miles per second. An email makes it to the other side of the planet at nearly half the speed of light. When the recipient uses POP, the server delivers all new emails to them and only keeps copies of them if an option in the email client is checked, if applicable. When the recipient uses IMAP, the server syncs the contents of the mailbox, including its Sent Items and other folders, to each device that connects with it.

Email involves many different steps and systems. You can learn more about the inner workings of email delivery with these resources:. To learn more about how to improve email message flow and practices for good email deliverability , these resources are a good place to begin:. This email boot camp will help you to increase the ROI of your email operations with 15 proven tactics for boosting email deliverability.

Learn how third-party data shows the deliverability difference between SparkPost and also-ran cloud service providers yields hard, bottom-line benefits. This practical course is a great way to get started understanding email deliverability and how to measure email performance. How does an email message flow?

However, when the message is a transactional email like a shipping notice or a password reset, the message is created automatically by those systems, usually using an email API. Marketing messages are generated by automated systems as well, although usually in large batches, rather than one at a time like transactional messages.

AI and Clara scheduling tools, and more. If you cc: hello hipmunk. You can also just send an email to the service directly. If it needs more information—when I tried it with a message about a plane flight, I forgot to mention a departure point—it will ask for it.

Similarly, if you give Hello Hipmunk permission to monitor your Google Calendar and are careful to plug in location information relating to upcoming plans in distant cities, the service will email you with travel recommendations. But it was only this year that the company was confident enough that it could understand enough about travel intentions expressed in free-form text to implement the idea in a way it thought was useful enough to pursue.

There are also lots of ways in which the service could be smarter.