There are lots of reasons why people hate spam: these commercial emails from companies and people you’ve never heard of are a big waste of your time and clog up your inbox.
Now here’s another reason to hate it: spam is environmentally unfriendly.
A new report by security company McAfee estimates that spam accounted for 62 trillion junk emails in 2008, or 62,000,000,000,000 messages. The total energy required to send and receive these unwanted emails is 33 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity.
That’s enough electricity to power 2.4 million households for a whole year – or all the homes in the Republic of Ireland for two years.
Greenhouse gas
The greenhouse gases involved in providing all this electricity to generate, send and then delete spam were equivalent to the emissions from 3.1 million cars, using two billion gallons of petrol.
For the “Carbon Footprint of Email Spam Report”, researchers estimated the computational power needed to process spam, from criminals manipulating infected PCs to send it, to Internet providers transmitting it, and end users viewing and deleting it.
They then calculated that the electricity needed to process one spam message results in 0.3 grams of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere. That’s the equivalent of driving three feet in a car. But if you multiply it by the yearly volume of spam, it is equivalent to driving around the Earth 1.6 million times.
“While the spam that arrives in any individual’s inbox may create just a small puff of carbon dioxide, the puff multiplied by millions of users worldwide adds up,” the report says.
Wasted energy
The researchers estimate that around four fifths of spam’s greenhouse emissions come from the energy that PCs use while users are viewing, deleting or sifting through spam looking for legitimate messages.
The latest figures from Microsoft show that spam accounts for 97% of all email.
Despite spam filters, McAfee estimates that people spend 100 billion user-hours per year dealing with the unwanted messages that do land in inboxes.
