Email Miles is new system that aims to showcase how many physical miles has an email travelled before it reaches its destination.
The system makes use of internet tracking, global positioning system to determine from where the message was sent and where it was received. Based on this information, Email Miles calculates the physical distance travelled by the email and shows it on a map alongside the email.
“The goal of Email Miles is to bring back the authentic nature of snail mail into something we now use daily as its replacement – email”, notes Jonah Brucker-Cohen the creator of Email Miles.
“Email Miles is both a free and open source plug-in for standard email software such as Apple’s Mail and Gmail that scans outgoing emails and their destination servers for their Geolocation, calculates the distance in miles and countries and continents the mail has traveled and tags each incoming email with this info”, reads the FundAnything page of the Email Miles project.
Giving an example of an email sent from New York to Dakar, in Senegal, Brucker-Cohen notes that the email travels to a server in Chicago then to Mountain View to Dallas to London and finally to its destination – somewhere around 12,115 miles (19,497 km).
Check out the video below:
