Speed of an e-mail?

I have asked this question how fast an E-mail travels but nobody has ever been able to tell me. All they tell me is instantly, but I know that it can't be instantly anywhere becuase the speed of light is the fastest speed that information can travel at....

So even if you had internet connection around a planet revolving around Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our sun it would take at least 4.22 years to get the e-mail from Earth. My question is does E-mail travel at lightspeed or does it travel slower? If slower how fast does E-mail travel?

E-mail travels in bits bytes.Their are 8 bits to a byte and 1024 Kbytes to a meg. The time it takes to reach the desired mail server depends on the ping time, size of the e-mail and speed of the sending and receiving computer Connection speed. Ping times are measured in milliseconds. Miles per second would not work as you can have a better ping time and a faster server 1000miles away than one 100miles away. Depending on how traveled number of Hops ect.

Also, you would have to take into consideration the email providers that you are sending/receiving from. In my experience, an email sent, say, from a yahoo address to another yahoo address will get there quicker than when sending from a yahoo address to an aol address, or something of the sort. But yeah, as far as when it is sent out from yahoo servers to the aol servers, I think stephanie's explanation above is pretty damn good.

It depends on many factors. Mail servers have to process all of the mail they receive. If someone sends them a lot of spam, it could possibly slow down the mail.

Email is not like light. It's not like a car. You can't measure how many miles per hour it is traveling.

If the networks are not clogged, email is fairly instant. Most emails take less than 5 minutes to reach their destination, but it is possible they could be delayed for hours and maybe not even delivered.

 
Equivalently, what you are asking is what is the speed of electicity. That is a complex subject. if you go to:

http://www.google.com/

and in the Search box type in:

speed of electricity

you will find interesting arcticles.

A simple answer to your question is:

Propagation speed in a copper conductor is about 2/3 the speed of light.

Goto start

Click run...

Type cmd

Press OK

In the box that comes up type:

ping -l [size of your email in bytes] [destination of email (eg. Fun mail me, destination is bob.com)]

Without brackets.

eg. ping -l 1500 funadvice.com

Read the number it gives out, in milliseconds, and devide by two, that is the time it takes for that amount of infomation to be sent via that route.