Slashdot Mirror
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.""
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...
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.
.. 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...
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.
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?"
>'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.
I'm pretty sure that globally, such dumb practices make several million cars' worth of extra CO2 emissions...