Oh brother, here we go. Recently, McAfee released a study that measured the carbon footprint of email Spam. Below are the key findings of that study:
• 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
• Spam filtering saves 135 TWh of electricity per year. That’s like taking 13 million cars off the road
• If every inbox were protected by a state-of-the-art spam filter, organizations and individuals could reduce today’s spam energy by approximately 75 percent or 25 TWh per year. That’s equivalent to taking 2.3 million cars off the road
• 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
• A year’s email at a typical medium-size business uses 50,000 KWh; more than one fifth of that annual use can be associated with spam
• Filtering spam is beneficial, but fighting spam at the source is even better. When McColo, a major source of online spam, was taken offline in late 2008, the energy saved in the ensuing lull — before spammers rebuilt their sending capacity — equated to taking 2.2 million cars off the road
• Much of the energy consumption associated with spam (80 percent) comes from end-users deleting spam and searching for legitimate email (false positives). Spam filtering accounts for just 16 percent of spam related energy use
Not only is email spam an annoyance to your email inbox, but it’s also harming the environment? Preposterous or accurate?
So does it use more carbon to just let the spam go through, of for the electricity used doing the computational work by the filer to determine what is and isn’t spam?
Train grandma to identify the e-mail as being SPAM before she prints it out to read it.
Thank you Al Gore for the Internet. Sheezz!
I don’t like global warming crap, but if it helps to get rid of spam I am for it
Just had a look at their data…
Bullshit from the spin doctor McAffee.
more bull from the carbon fraudsters
this is trial balloon to tax email via carbon tax. “they” have been trying to figure out how to tax email for a while now.
no doubt, they’ll use the same metrics to tax all internet traffic. -as the media and anyone else who spins news/information, hates the internet and would love to find a financial way of stifling it’s use.
with any luck, a few whistleblowers
will blow the lid off the carbon scam
before carbon laws are written in stone.
-s
Obviously it’s just a PR campaign, it’s not bull from the carbon fraudsters. Mcafee are just jumping on the carbon band wagon as a way of getting free advertising, and from a marketing point of view you can’t blame them.
Speaking personally though, all this unquestioned publishing of any old rubbish really does irk me.
So, Dvorak gets no SPAM, so he’s green?
J/P=?
Well, people expels CO2 also, so lets get rid of people…
imagine the footprint of 7 billion exhalers…
Sounds about right to me.
There are computers generating SPAM, computers transmitting the SPAM, computers filtering the SPAM, computers storing the SPAM… it all adds up pretty quick.
Just think of the hard drive space required by Gmail to temporarily store for 30 days (and backup, and replicate) the billions and billions of emails in their auto-cleaned SPAM folders.
Now add up all the email systems in the world that are dealing with SPAM in some form or another, and you can see that the electrical consumption will add up very very quickly.
I work at home, and use the internet to remotely connect to my office. Does that mean the extra electricity be used to handle the data transfer is producing more carbon that if I drive to work?
Another problem to consider:
If 10 people drive to an office, when they get there, they are all sharing the electricity to run the office, a/c, etc.
If they stayed at home, they’d each be running separate electricity, a/c, etc – would that be worse?
So, if email uses that much electricity, damn, how much is “wasted” by internet porn?
#12, I agree, not to mention posting to blogs… uhm, whoops!
Report was prepared For McAfee by climate-change consultants ICF International.
95% of energy use is attributed to:
Viewing Spam: 52%
Spam Filtering: 16%
False Positives: 27%
Incoming mail servers:< 1%
The 1st assumption they made is that you open every spam sent to you, including all the spam that GMail (or your other favorite server) intercepts. That means that all of you go to your (GMail) account online, open the Junk folder and proceed to open and check every piece of crap in there to see if it really is junk.
The 2nd assumption is that you open every piece of spam that gets through … for some strange reason, you open it to see that it is in fact spam (16% filtering),
And 3rd, that 27% of the energy wasted by spam – is you reading through seemingly legitimate emails ( and discovering that they are in fact spam. (false positives). Yup, you’ll open a ‘penis enlargement’ email for the 100th time and exclaim “damn its just junk mail. I better read it again just to make sure.”
Heres my experience. GMail catches 99% of my spam. Of the 1% that gets through, 90% I recognize as spam and delete without opening it, the other 10% I don’t look longer than 1 second at and then trash. I never look through any of them looking for a message.
In other words I use .001% of the energy they assume I use. Roughly ditto for everyone I know (personally) with email.
So, all the computers that pass and end up getting spam (including your PC) would be turned off & not using electricity if spam didn’t exist?
#13, Big Guy,
Well I look at posting on blogs as giving a place to vent so those like Alphie don’t go on a shooting spree at their local atheist hangout.
Bunk. Near total bunk.
There IS a carbon footprint to spam. Any server which is dedicated to spam filtering would have its power use eliminated if it were eliminated due to a lack of need to filter spam. No question.
Their claim is based on it taking 3 seconds per message to “display” spam while we decide to delete it or not, and attribute the computer and monitors entire per-second energy cost a part of the cost of spam.
Except…. My office machine is on whether I’m viewing spam or not. It’s lost productivity, because I’m not doing something ELSE during that time. But the absence of that message wouldn’t have resulted in any energy savings on my side. And the scammers would no doubt be engaged in some other scheme to get my money if not spam, which could be a higher or lower carbon footprint…
Overstated effort to make a case to sell some antispam effort or product IMO.
#12, Mr. Fusion, my guess is that viewing porn would use a million times the energy used by spam, but offset almost equally by the energy expended on friction and heat, somewhat lowering home heating bills.
#14, great research JimR.
-i use a gmail account and handle the spam
almost exactly as you do. -they have a great spam filter. no more than 3 spam emails a month every hit my main box.
after thought..
i bet this pales in comparison to the amount of energy wasted and subsequent CO2 produced trying to convince people of a link between human produced CO2 (or CO2 in general) and global warming..
IMO, the report itself is spam. -had it hit my mailbox, it would have been sent to the spam folder.
-s
“carbon fraudsters” — that’s a new one to me!
No doubt from the same people who brought us the delightful “Femi-Nazies” “IslamFascists” “enhanced interrogation” “PC Police” “extrajudicial renditions” and, the big three trillion dollar whopper, “weapons of mass destruction technology enhancement program intentions” (or whatever the hell the conservatives finally used to justify an unjustifiable war.)
I have to give conservatives credit for clever but empty spinning of English.
>> chuck said,
>> I work at home, and use the internet to remotely connect to my office. Does that mean the extra electricity be used to handle the data transfer is producing more carbon that if I drive to work?
More carbon? Not likely but possible. How much gas do you burn on your commute? If you bike or walk to work, that changes the whole equation.
If you heat your home while you stay home, that creates carbon because you normally could turn off the heat. (or cool, in the summer.) ALso, of course, lights, computer, whatever.
#20, why thank you. i’ll rush to trademark it straight away and prep to start a wave frivolous lawsuits.
i was going to go with carbon nazis, but felt it wouldn’t do nazis justice. happy?
-s
# 16 Mr. Fusion said, “…so those like Alphie don’t go on a shooting spree at their local atheist hangout.” Don’t be silly. Alfie would shoot up the Natural History Museum.
# 18 JimR said, “…friction and heat, somewhat lowering home heating bills.” Oh, yeah? Well, here in the tropics that friction and heat drives up A/C bills. So, if you save on heating and we spend on A/C, does that mean porn is carbon neutral?
As to the article, I’m sure spam contributes to energy usage. But, McAfee is in the business of selling anti-spam software (bloated and ineffective as it is). But, remembering Disraeli” lies, damned lies and statistics. You can literally prove anything (except that Alfie is an intelligently-designed creature) by parsing the stats. I suspect JimR’s stats are closer to reality than McAfee’s. I’m always surprised when I go online to check my email (instead of using Thunderbird locally) and see that spam folder with thousands of messages! I don’t read ’em. And I don’t have time to screen them to be sure they’re spam.
#20
ps.. one of the main reasons i call it fraud
is due the huge amount of solar, solar system, magnetic and “galactic” or galaxy wide data that is completely ignored by (science) politicos when gathering metrics to try and explain the anomalous weather (ie global warming) and justification of using CO2 as the sole culprit of human driven warming.
to wit, here is an excellent article (though long) that shows so much more needs to be taken into account when discussing the changes we are seeing planet wide, on many fronts.
(warming is not the focus, but is discussed)
“The Emerging Sunspot Cycle 24 and a Weakening Magnetic Field”
What does this mean for our planet and species?
http://tinyurl.com/apcefg
-s
Spam takes energy to send and filter. If people could charge the sender for email they didn’t want even if it was just a penny a lot of spammers would be out of business as to whom to charge the people selling the product.
Yeah I know, spammers would fight back by sending spam that resulted in the innocent being billed. Still if nobody was paying for spam…
Hummm, sounds like the RIAA statisctis from losed revenues by torrents…
>> strukhoff said,
>> Accurate. IT ain’t green. In fact, nothing is really green. Me driving my old Odyssey today is greener than the smug Prius driver, because I didn’t just spend $25K for a new car and all the non-Green manufacturing that went into it.
Accurate.
But you could buy a Prius next time.
Better is to park it and start walking, biking or taking mass transit to work.
And vote for mass transit and bike lanes the next time a initiative come to your ballot.
#25 has it right – and wrong. Right that you’re foolish if you don’t factor in the energy and environment cost of producing “energy-saving” devices. A more efficient fridge would save me money eventually, but my current fridge still works, and the manufacturing impact of the new one has to be considered as well. This is the same reason I drive a 13 year old car that gets 40+mpg, even though the Prius would technically be more efficient. If I drive a 10mpg truck, it might be a net-win to “trade-up” — but no way it’s better for the environment for me to trade, especially since my car would almost certainly be stripped and recycled, at best, and not repurchased at this point.
But #25 is also wrong. All of IT comes at an energy cost. But It’s net impact can be green – but it’s all relative to what you assume the world would look like without it. For example, relative to how we used to do business, how many tons of carbon are saved by the phone and internet data structure by preventing people from needing to meet face-to-face? Every web-based training or conference call, every commute not driven by those of us who telecommute… Or what about advances in green design or technology that result from application of computer technology – more efficient blades for wind turbines or better LED lightbulbs, more efficient transport and storage technology, whatever it might be — often designed using computer modeling, by people collaborating from across the globe that might otherwise never be able to spark each other’s innovative ideas?
#29… good post. 🙂
#29 – By driving that 13 year old car, you may have reduced your carbon footprint but you have also been a bad consumer. As a result of your personal inaction, thousands of autoworkers and support personnel are out of business. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Because of you, Oblahblahblahma will probably have to print another trillion bucks. And do you realize what the carbon footprint of the US Mint is like?
In general, I think spam is a terrible waste of resources. We should go back to junk mail. http://tiny.cc/1gGc9