With the excitement of the Olympics in London, you’d think all of England would be thrilled to be chosen for hosting privileges. Not all of them. My fiancé has booked passage to spend a month here in America. Among many reasons for being glad to miss the Olympics, he wants nothing to do with the increase in traffic and congestion. This brings to mind the concern of email traffic also being hindered.

When we think of email, we picture a simple homing-pigeon-like process of clicking a button and sending our “letter” on its way. This is far from the actual happenings. One email must go through several steps (known in the IT world as “layers”) before it can begin its journey. Once you are finished composing and click “Send,” an email must go through seven of these layers before leaving the safety of your computer (or phone, or laptop …).

Your message is essentially taken apart into many tiny pieces, or “packets,” labeled for its destination, and sent individually across the World Wide Web. A single message could in theory travel from California to New York, having some packets travel under the ocean and through Japan while others cross the Great Plains. These packets all (hopefully) meet at their intended destination, to be put back together and given to the recipient.  As with all travel, accidents may once in a while happen, and not all of the packets may make the journey. They may get lost, or have “collisions” along the way. In this case, if the recipient does not receive all of the pieces, it may send a request for another email to be sent. If it does not get an answer in a reasonable amount of time, a message is sent back to the sender with an apology and a “failure to send” statement.

With such a busy, heavy traffic flow, it is amazing the Web has such a safe “driving record.”  With so many people converging on England for the Olympics, one wonders: will there be more “traffic accidents” in the email world? Or will our packets simply adapt and find their way along their routes without a hitch?

To learn more, I recommend viewing this fantastic video demonstrating just what an email must survive to reach its destination: http://youtu.be/Ve7_4ot-Dzs.