If you ever had a pen pal, you know that physical letters used to arrive with some sense of wear and tear. If nothing else, they had the cancelled stamps. If they traveled far enough, though, it looked like they had really gone through something. You never knew just what, but it gave them something special.

Not so with email. You can shoot emails back and forth with someone in Japan and it feels no different than emailing a coworker on the next floor.

Should that change?

Jonah Bruckner-Cohen thinks so. That’s why he is building Email Miles, a project now seeking $8,000 in funding now on Kickstarter.

Help Email Miles create an open source app and API to tag all your incoming emails with the miles they traveled: pledge a donation now.

Email miles reads the headers on emails to show recipients all the cities they passed through and calculate miles traveled.

The first five backers to pledge $399 or more will get an Arduino driven personal odometer that will physically click off the miles of your incoming email on your desk.

If someone donates $5,000 or more, Bruckner-Cohen will build a globe that shows its user the path of his or her incoming emails in lights.