Spam wastes enough energy to circle the globe
By Dave Jeyes
Recent findings on the total cost of spam email converts these costs to environmental impacts. The amount of spam email sent on the Internet wastes enough energy to drive around the world not once, but 1.6 million times in one year.
A single spam email wastes enough energy to drive a car three feet. Multiply that by the approximately 1.6 trillion spam messages sent annually and you’re in for a mighty long car ride.
One aspect of these costs is related to the electricity used to power the systems relaying email to the user. However the much greater cost comes from the actual time and energy that we spend manually deleting spam from our email inboxes.
The cost of people’s time and actual productivity accounts for 80 percent of these costs. In comparison, advanced spam filtering technology represents just 16 percent of the actual cost.
Advanced spam filtering already saves 135 Twh of energy every year, or the amount of energy needed to run 13 million cars per year. However experts say that this is still an area that could use some improvement.
If everyone used spam filtering technology, it could shave another 75 percent of the costs of spam. This represents 25 Twh of further improvement, or the equivalent of taking 2.3 million cars off the road.
In addition to stemming errant energy costs, reducing spam can help knowledge workers gain back hours per year of sorting through spam emails and recovering important messages dumped into their email folders. This is turn leads to more productivity for companies.
These results come from a study commissioned by security provider McAfee and conducted by green consulting group ICF. While it was intended to show the environmental impact of spam, it rings true more in terms of personal productivity than anything else.
Since wasted time is the largest cost and the people are already at work, it’s hard to justify spam filters as a true cost savings. However it’s easy to see how less time wasted can result in higher worker productivity.
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on Thursday, April 16th, 2009 at 10:01 am
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April 16th, 2009
What a load of crap. A company that markets internet security software commissions a study that says using advanced spam filtering will save the Earth.
We should have mandated capital punishment for Spammers to combat climate change. Lethal injection, no electric chair of course.
It would take out my mother-in-law who sends an unending flow of junk like You Tube clips of funny animals and torrents of hoax filled tripe. But if it saves the Earth I’ll make the sacrifice.
April 18th, 2009
Yes, this is a load of crap, sorry to say. It angers me to see news like this coming from McAfee.
This is also not to say that computer users would be doing something different if it weren’t for spam; does it actually provide an additional cost?