For most of us, spam is nothing but piece of crap lying in our inbox waiting to be deleted. However, when you count the impact of spam on the environment, it leaves back a staggering amount of CO2, contributing to our global warming. According to a report by ICF and Mcafee around 62 trillion spam emails are sent each year that results into 17m tons of CO2 released in the air.
The report points out that one way to combat this is by installing a spam filter. ICF does acknowledge that cutting off the source is more important but by having an effective spam filter can reduce unwanted spam by 75%, equating to around 2.3m cars off the road.
Detailed report can be downloaded over here.
Seems suspect.
33 Trillion Watt-Hours (the amount mentioned in the report) divied by 62 Trillion emails = .52 Watt-Hours per email, or 1916 Watt-seconds. If an average computer runs at 150 Watts, that would mean each email is using about 13 seconds of compute time. Even assuming people read a bit of the email, that’s an absurd amount of time! Most spam email takes well less than a second to send and is usually read and deleted in less than a second. An order of magnitude would probably be closer…