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.""

Comments

So spam is bad then?

[HipToday]

Are you telling me spam has negative effects?

That's a lotta power

[tygerstripes]

If my mental arithmetic serves, that would be roughlyyyy... 1.21 Gigawatts!

Re:how many superfreighters is that?

[Chris Burke]

Superfreighter -- a unit for large amounts of particulate and SO2 pollution. Approximately equal to 50 million cars.

Whoa, whoa. "Car" isn't a standard unit of measurement. I assume you meant Volkswagon Beetles, but then the conversion factor might not be the same.

Re:how many superfreighters is that?

[Red Flayer]

I think you're getting a bit confused on the standard units.

Car is a standard unit for pollution (particularly CO2 emissions).

VW Beetles are a unit of length, but only when stacked or laid end-to-end.

My Research On The Subject

[BigBlueOx]

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.

I love this new unit

[Cormacus]

"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!

Re:MacAfee Finds Way to Market Product as Green!

[smallfries]

It would still be nice just to wipe it out at the source of course.

So you advocate... nuking it from orbit?

Re:MacAfee Finds Way to Market Product as Green!

[Daimanta]

"So you advocate... nuking it from orbit?"

I'm afraid so, it's the only way to be sure.

Re:Back of the Envelope

[Massacrifice]

GOT NO HANDS? DONT USE YOUR NOSE TO SEND SPAM! IMPRESS THEM WITH YOUR TOOL! TYPE N CLICK WITH YOUR DICK AND ENLARGE YOUR AUDIENCE!

(blabla this little sentence added to get pass the /. CAPS filter even if it ruins my joke, but it seems that one sentence is not enough i wonder how much time got spent writing the regex that checks for too many caps in message)