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The Ecological Impact of Spam
krou writes "A new study entitled 'The Carbon Footprint of Spam' (PDF) published by ICF International and commissioned by McAfee claims that spam uses around 33 billion kilowatt hours of energy annually, which is approximately enough to power 2.4 million US homes (or roughly 3.1 million cars) for a year. They calculated that the average CO2 emission for a spam email is around 0.3 grams. Interestingly, the majority of energy usage (around 80%) comes from users viewing and deleting spam, and searching for legitimate emails within spam filters. They also claim that 'An individual company can find that one fifth of the energy budget of its email system is wasted on spam.' One of the report's authors, Richi Jennings, writes on his blog that 'spam filtering actually saves an incredible amount of energy.' He continues, 'Imagine if every inbox were protected by a state-of-the-art spam filter. We could save about 75% of the spam energy used today — 25 TWh per year; that's like taking 2.3 million cars off the road.""
What's the carbon footprint of my toilet wastes? I think knowing that would be more beneficial for calculating arbitrary numbers for the waste of spam
Imagine if every inbox were protected by a state-of-the-art spam filter. We could save about 75% of the spam energy used today â" 25 TWh per year; that's like taking 2.3 million cars off the road.
My God! That is fantastic! If only we had the option to purchase a "state-of-the-art spam filter!" Wait, I know! McAfee, the people who sponsored and paid for this research, have SpamKiller! It's perfect.
... that would have to be some pretty impressive and efficient Bayesian filtering with an amazing database technology to drop below viewing and deleting e-mails.
Although I can't access the PDF (download hangs), could you please direct me to the part of the 'research' where you analyze the amount of energy used to perform complex computational functions on tokens from e-mails against a database. And prove that this is less than the energy wasted flipping though e-mails and deleting spam? I mean, the network usage is going to be the same so
And maybe you could factor in the cost and subscription to said state-of-the-art spam filter?
What? You didn't include that analysis in your research? It sounds like a very crucial part of convincing me to acquire a state-of-the-art spam filter. You missed that part?
You don't say.
My work here is dung.
Well, of course it uses energy.
But you could also argue the fact that nearly as much energy was wasted conducting the survey and then it getting posted to /., then having all those people read it.
Sounds like an MS study on linux to me...
Are you telling me spam has negative effects?
I don't care what anybody else says, we need a new protocol for messaging. It could combine the best parts of email with the best parts of social networking/IM/SMS and surpass them all. We need a network where there is some way to ascertain the origin of any email/account. We need automatic encryption. We can still keep SMTP around, there's no need to kill it (so we can have anonymous networks), but we need something else now. I know, I know, easier said than done and put your money where your mouth is, but for my part, I am trying to use email less and less, while switching to Facebook/Twitter/SMS to get in touch with people.
Or far less than one container ship.
I know, that's for particulate and SO2 emissions, not CO2.
But still, kind of puts things in perspective, huh? Imagine if we bought fewer consumer goods from 8000 miles away... and how much less energy would be consumed. It could dwarf the savings from spam filtering -- not that this makes spam filtering any less of a good idea.
On a side note, I'd like to propose a new standard unit for the metrically challenged.
Superfreighter -- a unit for large amounts of particulate and SO2 pollution. Approximately equal to 50 million cars.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
If we worry about wasted computer cycles, I'm sure unnecessary screen savers are responsible for many orders of magnitude more. Or leaving flash animation ads running while you are not looking at it.
Please stop responding to SPAM. If no one responds to it, then they won't make any money and they'll stop.
Sincerely,
A. Bettik
If my mental arithmetic serves, that would be roughlyyyy... 1.21 Gigawatts!
Meta will eat itself
.. someone is taking a popular "problem", tangently tying it to a technological issue & trying to figure out ways to sell feel-good services around them.
There is a war going on for your mind.
The majority of the energy is spent reading the spam and searching spam folders for legit mail, right?
So where is that energy coming from / going? Perhaps you're counting the energy of running my PC while I'm doing those things? But what's your "0 energy" baseline? Are you assuming that 30 secnods of me searching my email = 30 additional seconds before my computer gets to swtich to power-save mode? Because that's not always true -- it often means 30 seconds less of me playing some game before my ride shows up, and the computer goes to sleep at the same time it would've otherwise.
Maybe its the energy the server spends reading the email from disk that's significant. That might be a vaild concern...
State-of-the-art filters? No way! Carbon footprint be damned.
A chance at enlarging the footprint of a certain body part of mine is more important to me!!
I have determined that email spam kills small children! And puppies! And endangered sand panthers!
The only way we can save our planet from the ecological abuse that is spam is for you to send me money. Lots of money. And then I'll jolly well put a stop to that! And I will too.
"cars off the road" is an awesome new unit. Now if only we can get the conversion factor to "Libraries of Congress," we can have some serious fun with numbers!
Mon chien, il n'a pas du nez. Comment scent-il? TrÃs mauvais!
Everyone is now required to use gmail (best spam filter I've seen)..maybe the G is for green not google.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Good ol' carbon footprint. Best racket ever invented. You can sell a solution to a problem that doesn't exist and to solve the problem (after others have paid you (immense amounts of cash) to do so for them) is to do nothing!
Got a technology that would be inconvenient for your pocketbook? Say it has a large carbon footprint.
Got a company that isn't paying you money yet? Pass cap and trade legislation and make them pay you.
And just by coincidence you have the only [product] that meets carbon footprint standards...
The devil is a hack compared to Al Gore.
And don't forget the number of man-hours wasted on anti-spam measures and manual spam handling.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Most spam is sent from hijacked computers, so they're stealing OUR power to send spam to US.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Don't let anti-corporate hysteria blind you from looking objectively at this problem. Well, if spam did not exist I would not need a state of the art spam filter. That would be 2U less rack space and about 200W less power I would need to use in my data center. Really, just multiply all the instances of dedicated spam filters, proprietary or otherwise, and it's pretty easy to come up with a number. Plus, I'll bet 5% of Google's resources are dedicated to spam blocking and at least 5% of any ISP's resources are dedicated to transporting it. That's a big number.
Of course, McAfee would not exist either. Lots of people would be unemployed, and maybe they could find a cure for world hunger or something else useful instead.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
This really points out the need for a new Internet in which anonymous use is either very difficult or impossible. The spammers, phishers et al could be rooted out or blocked and the rest of us could get on with life.
Or suppose we could take every person responsible for spam, roast them alive (as slowly as possible and in public) and use the energy of roasting them to produce electricity. That would be a huge leap forward.
be running anyways?
Stupid and and tenuous at best.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
And do not forget all the greenhouse emissions from people farting while reading the spam!
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
>'Imagine if every inbox were protected by a state-of-the-art spam filter. We could save about 75% of the spam energy used today -- 25 TWh per year; that's like taking 2.3 million cars off the road.'
Um, yeah. No. Stopping spam at the recipient end, after it's already been generated at someone else's compromised machine and gone through all those tubes and things, isn't going to save much in the way of actual energy. I suspect this number is wildly optimistic, IE, made up.
I mean, I hate spam as much as the next computer user, maybe even more, as sysadmins see more of the larger impact. There is some amount of vicarious satisfaction in focusing the Fury of the Greens at spam. But if you're really sincere about saving energy, and not just indulging in hyperbole, you want to stop it at the sending end.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Seriously, I'm tired of all these so called studies that say we can save X number of units of some value if we stop doing Y with a computer, or alter some other process. I know "going green" is the new catchphrase, but a lot of this nonsense is, well, nonsense. It should be of more concern the amount of time spam email wastes, and the money idiots waste actually replying to, or buying from, those activities. If a spam message gets through the filters already in place, I spend a few seconds to identify it as spam and press delete. That's a few seconds per year in my case.
I'll admit that I did not RTFA, but on the surface it appears that this is based on the presumption that time spent dealing with spam = energy wasted. I don't understand how they can presume this. As if the systems would be off or in some lower power state if they were not being used for handling the spam messages? How many people put their systems into a lower power mode when not being actually used by the human? I would guess very few. Does my monitor use more energy displaying spam than it does displaying anything else? I don't think so. My PC is running mprime when it is "idle", so in my case, the PC probably uses less energy when I am using the system than when it is "idle". This is sort of like Microsoft proclaiming that a study they sponsored revealed that IE is better/faster/stronger than the other browsers. Of course McAfee is going to portray spam in the most evil light it can. Since the catch phrase of the day is being "green", anything they can do to make their products appear to help you or your company become more "green", is a marketing coup on their part.
'spam filtering actually saves an incredible amount of energy.' He continues, 'Imagine if every inbox were protected by a state-of-the-art spam filter. We could save about 75% of the spam energy used today -- 25 TWh per year; that's like taking 2.3 million cars off the road."
Change your email address once every six weeks, don't ever user your real email address to subscribe to online mags, like slashdot ..
Didn't Al Gore invent spam? Maybe we could buy carbon credits from him so we can send more spam and feel good about ourselves.
I just want to give everyone a big green hug!
Talking of spam in mid 2009, is like being stuck in Groundhog Day or these people who seem to be stuck in the same 36 hours.
"33 billion kilowatt hours of energy annually, which is approximately enough to power 2.4 million US homes (or roughly 3.1 million cars) for a year"
You can't power cars with kilowatts. If you're going to make a nonsensical unit conversion, make it good. Spam uses around 8.761 x 10^16 foot pounds, or 1.188 x 10^24 ergs, or 7.451 x 10^35 electron volts. Still working on how many parsecs it would cut off the the Kessel run.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
From the article: "A year's email at a typical medium-sized business uses 50,000 KWh."
What's a "medium sized business"? In the US, 100 to 500 employees. In the EU, 50 to 250 employees. So let's use 250 employees as a "typical medium sized business".
How much email infrastructure is needed for 250 employees? Not much. If you use Microsoft's sizing data for Exchange servers, Microsoft says you need 2.5 MIPS per mailbox, and 0.75 I/O operations per second per mailbox. So for 250 employees, one low-end rackmount server is more than enough; it's about 3x the capacity needed. You'd like to have at least two, for redundancy, of course, with RAID disks in both. So you need two 1U servers, four drives, and a router or two. One study suggests 200 watts per server, but that's based on Google, which worries about power efficiency. And it doesn't include air conditioning load. So figure 1KW for the mail system, or 12KWH/day, or 8760 KWh/year. That's based on very generous sizing of everything.
This is less than 20% of the number in the paper. How did they possibly get a number 5x that big? Are they allocating idle desktop machine resources to mail?
Wow, this may be the ticket to get politicians to pass some anti-spam laws with real teeth to them. All politicians want to look good. Looking like they are saving the environment is a good cause.
This is a blatant attempt to rationalize putting money into the "War Against Spam" on the basis of the environmental hysteria.
For all I care, the conclusion about energy waste may be accurate, but what other useless activities would we be doing with those resources if we eliminated spam?
The fundamental point doesn't have much to do with environmental impact, although large data centers do have a large footprint in whatever units. The real issue is who pays the price and whether society should reward such behavior. The only people who would argue for spam providing a "benefit" are the spammers and meta-spammers themselves.
The economic footprint of an activity almost always comes down to the tragedy of the commons. Not just why should society put up with such antisocial and expensive behavior - but how can we practically dissuade malfactors from engaging in such?
That said, it is often surprisingly straightforward to compute the expense (in some measure) of an activity. For instance, the marginal cost of gzip versus Rice compression was computed to be $2.83 more per image for an archival project I was involved in. The precise cost would be different now (three years later) but would be quite significant.
As with spam, an archive is a store and forward (and replicate and persist) system. Each permanent copy has an expense. Each temporary copy has an expense. Each network replication has an expense. It is the aggregate throughput of the workflow. I wouldn't personally think that carbon footprint was the best way to express this, but someone has to pay that cost - and very frequently it isn't the party creating the mess in the first place.
What's the carbon footprint from this study. The salaries of each person plus the distance they must travel to get to work. What a waste of money...and carbon.
He continues, 'Imagine if every inbox were protected by a state-of-the-art spam filter. We could save about 75% of the spam energy used today
For every security system made there is someone who is able to break through it. Besides, this guy is just trying to promote his shitware. Hate mcaffee.
This spam issue will be solved when gov'ts actively seek/prosecute spammers and the people they are advertising for (you think Viagra will pay spammers once they get slammed with fines from the gov't?)
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
It's funny how the government is so worried about the effects of spam e-mails, however they tend not to worry too much about all this junk mail sent out all the time. (most of which goes straight to my shredder without even being opened)
i'm sure if they were able to profit from junk e-mails they wouldn't care a thing about the environmental impact.
I have a box trapper on my webhosting account. Any non-white listed sender has to respond to an automated email. Am I helping by blocking spam, or am I hindering by sending additional e-mails?
You never expect irony, do you?
Want to be a professional wrestler? Visit www.iyfwrestling.com
@iyfwrestling
How much of it is from Jack Thompson?
Kill all your spam filters, then print it out and use it to heat your house when it gets cold. Problem solved, especially if you use green paper and ink.
1011 1010 1101 1100 0000 1111 1111 1110 1110
But that's only PART of the problem. Imagine how much energy is also used by viruses running these computers nonstop to send out that spam.
Why, if only there was some company that could supply both an anti-virus AND a spam-filter. That way, we would only need one program, and safe further energy... somehow.
What's that? McAfee can cover not one, but BOTH of those objectives? Why, what a happy coincidence that the company sponsoring this study can help us in so very many ways!
Planet Zebeth - Metroid with a twist
I bet comment tags has a big a carbon footprint as spam. Maybe even more on the large scale.
You have bloated markup and the thousands of kilobytes of data that exists between comment tags you will find in the same bloated markup.
As far as bloated markup goes, it is easily disposed of with a code cleaner. By one way or another, make every web page to be certified correct by law which currently is only voluntary by responsible people who use completely free code validators. Outlaw substandard code thus disposing of the bloat. Outlaw malicious code while you're at it.
Ban the use of comment tags and their contents in publicly accessible web content because it serves no public purpose. You never see it. Your browser does not render it. None the less, it is transmitted and eats up your RAM and consumes your CPU power to process it.
The carbon footprint of comment tags and their content is nigh astronomical. I'm sure it eats up massive amounts of bandwidth and CPU/RAM processing power every hour of the day.
Look at it sometime, especially on news websites. The most recent I saw was one little paragraph of news but the comment tags contained about 40,000 characters of text and every page on their site as like that. You will find this in almost every web page you look at.
View source and check it out for yourself then look at how big the internet is and try to imagine how much of that traffic is comment tags and their content. Removing comment tags and their contents would increase the speed of the net and I don't think it would be negligible but a noticeable increase in overall connectivity because trillions of daily terabytes of totally useless data was removed from the stream.
Just the money alone that comment tags waste on bandwidth and energy consumption every day is staggering.
40,000 characters. A long time ago it took me about 3 months to write a 100,000 word novel. The 40,000 characters is almost half a book so by disposing of almost half of a novels worth of totally useless content in the markup and the delivery of it most definitely would have a significant impact on the internet and energy consumption resources. Multiply that by all sites being banned from using comment tags.
Bloated markup and comment tags have an effect on the internet similar to your advertised city and highway gas mileage that applies to your vehicle with the exception of a trunk full of wet sand.
Look at the cost of memory cards and how much of your RAM do they steal with comment tags? Multiply that by all the RAM consumed everyday by comment tags. That could be equal to the storage capabilities of billions of RAM cards each day. The waste is astronomical.
Comment Tags are only Green in syntax highlighting.
Sure, the study is likely wildly wrong on the numbers and is self-serving on McAfee's part, but so what? Reducing carbon footprint is all the rage these, and if politicians latch onto this study, maybe they'll be more likely to really do something about spam.
So shut up and stop providing well-considered criticism of this report (not that it matters, the politicians generally don't read slashdot and they certainly don't pay attention to the truth, unless it happens to coincide with public perception).
Surely someone out there can conceive a better system than what we have now...?
Co-operation beats competition
Listen up dipshits,
CO2 is good for the earth and that means you and me. Worrying about CO2 and attempting to link it to AMG is as dead of an end you can get next to your geek sex life. Instead of wasting time jerking this around, get some real work done and remember Volcanism, Plate Tectonics and Solar Actvity is why the globe warms or cools and there is not a thing you can do.
All these worlds are ours not yours dumbasses, we decide what the temperature is tomorrow, you are merely a guest
Lovingly Mother Nature and the Forces of the Universe
SMTP is not the problem, the way SMTP is used is the problem.
Today's email protocol suite supports end to end encryption, hop by hop encryption, integrity, signatures, authentication, and a host of other capabilities. And there is widespread support for all this stuff in the email software that's currently deployed.
The problem is that in the email service, as it is currently operated, these various capabilities are not set up in a way that be used to deal with the spam problem.
Instead of defining new service with the right characteristics, what's been done instead is to try and build new facilities like DKIM that are simultaneously compatible with the email service and provide better spam protection. The problem with this approach is the design constraints are pretty severe and you almost always end up with less than what you hoped to do.
Is defining a new service with different operational parameters the right answer? I don't know if it is or not. But what I do know is that there have been at least four attempts to develop standards for "next generation email" so far, and they have all cratered.
So by all means advance the argument that "the current email service sucks". But it is a poor workman who blames their tools.
If the majority of the energy is being consumed by end users searching through spam quarantines for false positives, then it would make sense to reject spam instead of quarantining it. (Yes, that's what I do on my server.) In that case, you never pay to store the spam (energy savings), your end users never have to search for real mail within the spam (time and energy savings), and in the event of a false positive, the sender knows that the message didn't make it through because they get a bounce. In my opinion, that's better.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Stop fighting spam. It will save energy.
This is your inbox on man-bear-pig.
you first have to believe that energy usage from computers is significant enough to be a factor for global warming (I don't...), then you have to believe that by reducing spam you will reduce energy consumption. Given that most pcs run 24/7 because that's more efficient than turning it off and on, you are reduced to calculating the extra power consumed while screening and deleting spam. So you take a fraction of a small number and reduce it to a still smaller number...
Sorry, that doesn't pass the common sense test.
Just because you can calculate a number doesn't mean it is valid. Not all things that can be measured should be, and not all things that should be measured can be.
Wow - spam costs energy. Big news!
People that don't want to contribute anything useful to society seek ways to prey and profit on idiots. Big news again!!!
What's the solution?
Block the idiot's spam instead of the idiot.
Great fscking job!
Now I know why I weep when I see articles detailing the cost of a few watts on a processor or power supply when we continue to blatantly allow the same carriers that carry spam to be our sole data providers.
And just how much fu$cking 'spam energy' would we save if we fu$cking legalized marijuana? And if you can't wrap your pea-brains around that; contemplate how much fu$cking spam energy could be saved if junk mail were eliminated from the postal service. *carbon footprint*carbon footprint*carbon footprint*you are bad*you are bad*you are bad*carb..... No, wait. How about slitting your throats (saves bullets) and using your guts as violin strings instead? How much 'spam energy' would THAT save?
My mail server at work uses about 25% of it processing constantly to sort the mail.
Let's eliminate the spammers, thus saving 100% of that energy. I'm thinking the same way the US recently eliminated some pirates.
These guys are wasting at least a day of my life every year, plus billions of dollars corporations an individuals spend avoiding their plague of emails, and then on top of that they're destroying the environment. Terrorists, every last one of them.
As someone trying to market a service, spam, as defined as untargeted broadcasts to auto-harvested addresses, has made it much more difficult to get through to people using email, even when the campaign is highly-targeted and CAN-SPAM-compliant.
So I've had to switch to physical letters, which use much more energy and resources.
Think about the deadweight of promotional material that you get in your letterbox and subscription publications each year. Wouldn't it be better if email could carry some of this "push" channel?
Can the benefit of this technological marvel called email be restored in some way? Perhaps through an special opt-out channel that gets protected from anti-spam filters by paying the recipient.
I have had an active (5-30/day) email account for 2 years. Monthly I receive one spam. The reason? I don't register my email address with every dumbass thing I see on the internet. I "register" with businesses with which I am actively engaged in the transfer of data deliverables or accounting information. That is all. (I get that one spam because I actually needed to try a trial software).
I'm pretty sure that globally, such dumb practices make several million cars' worth of extra CO2 emissions...
How much energy do we save if we enforce a death penalty for spammers on their third strike? Then you won't have to even spend the energy to filter your email servers.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I wonder if the amount of pollution generated by spam has exceeded the amount generated by junk mail, and if so, by how much?
And for once it's something I could really get behind.