A new study entitled ‘The Carbon Footprint of Spam’ published by ICF International and commissioned by the computer security company McAfee, claims that spam uses around 33 billion kilowatt hours of energy annually, which is approximately enough to power 2.4 million US homes for an entire year.
They calculated that the average CO2 emission for a spam email is around 0.3 grams. “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 report states.
Interestingly, the majority of energy usage–around 80%–comes from users viewing and deleting spam, and searching for legitimate emails within spam filters (also known as false positives).
Spam creates the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars using two billion gallons of gasoline each year.
The good news is that McAfee notes that current levels of spam filtering save 135 billion killowatt-hours of electricity that would otherwise be wasted. “That’s like taking 13 million cars off the road,” the report says. But, we could remove the equivalent of another 2.3 million cars if every inbox were protected by a state-of-the-art spam filter.
“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,” the report tells us. But another way to fight the energy-sucking power of spam is not to pass it on. Be mindful of slowing down the traffic on the information superhighway, and you’ll be helping keep up the internet speed!.
Tags: Internet Speed