Key Findings:
- An estimated worldwide total of 62 trillion spam emails were sent in 2008
- Globally, annual spam energy use totals 33 billion kilowatt-hours (KWh), or 33 terawatt hours (TWh). That’s equivalent to the electricity used in 2.4 million homes in the United States, with the same GHG emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars using two billion United States gallons of gasoline
- The average GHG emission associated with a single spam message is 0.3 grams of CO2. That’s like driving three feet (one meter) in equivalent emissions, but when multiplied by the annual volume of spam, it’s like driving around the Earth 1.6 million times
- The average business email user is responsible for 131 kg of CO2 per year in email-related emissions and 22 percent of that figure is spam-related.
- The energy required annually to create, send, receive, store, and view spam adds up to more than 33 billion KWh, approximately equivalent to 4 gigawatts of baseload power generation or the power provided by four large new coal power plants.
- ICF estimates spam-related emissions for all email users at an annual total of 17 million metric tons of CO2
- Users viewing and deleting spam is the largest energy drain associated with spam, almost 18 billion kWh or 52 percent of total spam energy.
Source: McAfee
thats a nice way too only if most of yr contacts are already in these social sites.. its still a long way for these sites to completely replace email .
So what can the average person do on their own? Here are some ideas… (any more suggestions are welcome…)
If viewing spam is really the biggest use of energy, what about just dragging the spam message to your Trash/Delete bin without ever opening it? That’s generally recommended anyway for security and virus protection. But the energy savings is something else I’ll keep in mind now.
Like “titli” suggested, I have a separate email address that I only use with web sites that make you enter an email address (when I have no interest in getting email from them). I don’t even read the email that comes to that address. But after reading this article, I’ll try to adjust the account settings to delete all my mail more regularly. Until now I never thought about the electricity used for just storing junk emails.
For employers, spam isn’t just a security issue, considering the amount of server space the spam probably uses. If your place of work doesn’t have good spam filtering, maybe employees should point out to the accounting departments that this is wasting a lot of money in electricity as well as sever space (and equipment upkeep, if they maintain their own servers). My place of work made big improvements to spam filtering recently. I assumed this was just for security reasons, but maybe there
was a financial motive as well.
other option is to have two email ids… one where u can feed in to other websites… thats how SPAM spreads.. and the other email id.. an exclusive one only for personal/business contacts… but this email id obviously shud not be entered at various sites…
I found that report interesting as well. Too bad McAfee and the other anti-spam companies haven’t made any headway in decreasing the amount of spam. It doesn’t look like they are making a dent. This is probably because the main way to combat spam is with filtering technologies. I, for one, have reverted, almost exclusively, to using internal email systems like in linkedin (Inmail) and facebook’s mail system to communicate with the people I know and trust.