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The Ecological Impact of Spam

Posted by Soulskill on from the hello-sir-madam dept.

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.""

2 of 176 comments (clear)

  1. Re:how many superfreighters is that? by Red+Flayer · · Score: 3, Informative

    Sorry, link was on another site... not slashdot.

    Here's the article in question re: particulate, SO2, and NOx emissions of superfreighters.

    --
    "Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
  2. Re:SMTP sucks by stevied · · Score: 3, Informative

    At one point Internet Mail 2000 looked like a nice idea. Quick summary: sender basically "publishes" the outgoing email on their server (or their ISPs server), and sends a ping to the recipient saying where it is.

    This has the advantage, for spam tracking, that you have to have a valid IP address for the sender, which can easily be checked against blacklists. ISPs that detect a spam-run in progress can just drop all the spam from their server, and only recipients that have been really quick on the ball about responding to the pings will get the spam. Also, if a spam filter can make a decision based on the contents on the ping, the whole message doesn't have to be retrieved.

    Looked at another way, it's basically just publishing a private blog entry and sending a notification ..