Ever wondered how an email travels from your computer, phone or tablet to your recipient of choice? Wonder no more! Google has launched an interactive site called Story of the Send that shows exactly how your email travels through Google’s systems.

As the site shows, the process begins when you hit Send, and your digital message travels from your ISP (Internet Service Provider) to Google’s Data Center. Once at Google numerous safety measures keep your data and messages safe, such as security cameras, iris scans and fingerprint scans. Google then goes on to tell you about its green data centers that use less energy. They even go on to admit that it’s 80 degrees in their data centers, and that they allow their employees to wear shorts! Wouldn’t you like a job where you could wear shorts to work?

After that the message hits the actual servers, which not only host Gmail but many other Google services, allowing the whole system to be much more efficient. The servers process the data, create backups of messages, scan emails for viruses, and filter out spam. After all this work is done by the server Google pushes the message to your recipients. It seems like a long trip, but all this happens in mere seconds.

Throughout the interactive site, there are numerous extra pieces of content, ranging from photos of data centers and servers, to videos on ways Google uses green energy and the resources available to minimize their carbon footprint (hint: using seawater to cool one of their data centers). It’s pretty cool to see all this in action, and get a better breakdown of just some of the work that goes on behind the scenes of technology we use everyday. Make sure to check out the link and to see the videos!