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.""

Re:MacAfee Finds Way to Market Product as Green!

[Idiomatick]

I think the electricity wasted on your monitor by bringing spam up.. Maybe a few seconds max. That will FAR overshadow any filtering techniques occurring in your processor.

Dear World,

[A. B3ttik]

Please stop responding to SPAM. If no one responds to it, then they won't make any money and they'll stop.

Sincerely,
A. Bettik

Re:Dear World,

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if the spammers were taken out on a main street and shot, would that discourage spammers? Or would it just give us all a smug feeling of satisfaction?

Re:Dear World,

[Samschnooks]

Please stop responding to SPAM. If no one responds to it, then they won't make any money and they'll stop. Sincerely, A. Bettik

Can you actually respond to them? I once got a spam email and I was in a really pissed off mood and wanted to take it out on someone who deserved it, so I tried to contact the spammer. The email they included didn't work. There wasn't any phone number. I couldn't find any way of contacting them. I can't believe some of those morons actually make any money. Sometimes, I wonder if it's the ISPs that host those assholes that are pushing this shit. Maybe convincing stupid people that they can get rich sending mass electronic marketing or some other made up buzz word that obfuscates the fact that they are selling you a spammer package. Moron spammer buys it, sends out a bunch of emails, and then gives up after a while; only to have another moron take his place? Just guessing.

Re:SMTP sucks

[cromar]

Considering there was a post on /. a bit ago claiming email was 95% spam... I would guess that services that can identify the message senders* would have less of a problem dealing with spam. Email spam is illegal, but as far as I know, Facebook spam and SMS spam are not. That makes a big difference. There have been plenty breakthroughs in messaging, and email is cold behind the times technically, socially and practically.

*either through public key encryption (anonymous) or by making people register to use the protocol (easy to bring charges against spammers)

The main problem is bot nets

[WillAffleckUW]

Most spam is sent from hijacked computers, so they're stealing OUR power to send spam to US.

Spam has ruined email as a marketing channel

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone trying to market a service, spam, as defined as untargeted broadcasts to auto-harvested addresses, has made it much more difficult to get through to people using email, even when the campaign is highly-targeted and CAN-SPAM-compliant.

So I've had to switch to physical letters, which use much more energy and resources.

Think about the deadweight of promotional material that you get in your letterbox and subscription publications each year. Wouldn't it be better if email could carry some of this "push" channel?

Can the benefit of this technological marvel called email be restored in some way? Perhaps through an special opt-out channel that gets protected from anti-spam filters by paying the recipient.