As if spam wasn’t bad enough when it simply flooded our inboxes with promises of vast fortunes held captive in foreign lands and miracle drugs to cure all of life’s ills, new research suggests that it causes as much greenhouse gas to be released each year as 3.1 million cars. The study, conducted on behalf of computer security company McAfee by ICF International showed that nearly 80% of energy use associated with emails was taken up by users deleting unsolicited messages and searching for legitimate correspondence.
Considering the global concerns over reducing our carbon footprints and reversing the effects of climate change, these findings come as a boon to the software giant and certainly support their agenda, but that being said, the stats are pretty convincing.  From The Sun, “the report also claimed that spam filtering currently saved enough energy to reduce emissions equivalent to taking 13 million cars off the road.” Something to keep in mind the next time you’re thinking about forwarding a chain letter to every person in your address book.
The Sun: Spam is huge waste of energy
[image via wap.org]
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I wonder how much energy would be saved if people didn’t spend time writing about reports about spam, writing posts about reports written about spam, commenting on posts written about reports written about spam and reading dumb comments like this on about comments on blog posts about reports written about spam?
can I have more coffee now please?
April 16th, 2009 at 11:21 am
Yes, I’ll make the coffee. But, can you point me first to the calculation that appeared on the Hoaxbusters site of the US Dept. of Energy that explained how chain emails expand in the number of recipients per generation of sends? It was most convincing in that it scared readers into not just clicking FWD. To bad they took the site down. Well, we took them down and put real energy persons into office. Got em.
June 25th, 2009 at 5:47 am