A few days ago McAfee / ICF International released a report about “The Carbon Footprint of Email Spam“. The numbers shown in this report are amazing, the wasteWaste consists of unwanted and thrown away goods that often still have value as fuel or raw material. of electricityA form of energy having magnetic, radiant and chemical effects. Electric current is created by a flow of electrons. is frustrating and the impact of Spams on our climateClimate is typically defined as the average weather (or more rigorously a statistical description of the average in terms of the mean and variability) over a period of time, usually 30 years. These quantities are most often surface variables such as temperature, precipitation, and wind. Climate ... (CO2 EmissionsCarbon dioxide (CO2) is emitted in several ways. Naturally through the carbon cycle and through human activities like the burning of fossil fuels. These human activities have increased CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial revolution and these high ...) is really frightening.

Let’s summarise the report:

• About 62 trillion spam emails where sent in 2008
• These Spam-mails used about 33 billion kilo-watt-hours, which is equivalent to 2.4 million homes in the US!
• If every inbox would be state-of-the-art spam-protected, this would reduce the spam energy consumption(Final) energy consumption includes all energy supplied to to final user and includes all sectors, such as households, industries, agriculture…. by 75% (which is equivalent to taking 2.3 million cars off the road!)
• The average GHG emissionEmissions of greenhouse gases, greenhouse gas precursors, and aerosols associated with human activities, including the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, land-use changes, livestock, fertilisation, etc. (IPCC) associated with one single spam message is 0.3 grams of CO2Carbon dioxide (CO2) is emitted in several ways. Naturally through the carbon cycle and through human activities like the burning of fossil fuels. These human activities have increased CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial revolution and these high .... Thats like driving one meter … multiplied by the annual volume of spam you could drive around the Earth 1.6 million times with emitting the same amount of CO2

Wow … that’s amazing, isn’t it …

Most of the energyThe ability to perform work, mainly kinetic, potential, thermal energy, but also in forms of gravitational, sound, elastic and electromagnetic energy. consumption caused by spam come from end-users delting or moving spam in their inbox and searching for legitimate emails. Therefore it definetly makes sense to use spamfilters (they only use 16% of the spam-related energy) to reduce the Spam-amount in users inboxes.

But – is that the right way? Filtering Spam’s instead of fighting the spam at it’s source … Well, the report shows some impressive figures to show that fighting the spam would be much better than only filtering it. On November 11, 2008 a US based provider known as one of the biggest spam-producers was taken offline by its upstream provider. This reduced the global spam-volume for a few dazs by 70% … and saved a lot of energy and CO2 emissions … (ICF equated this reduced spam traffic to taking 2.2 million cars off the road).

All these figures are really impressive … maybe a bit too impressive as the report was written by a Virus/Spamfighting Software Producer (McAffee) – nevertheless, this report shows that a lot of energy is wasted by Spam Emails and that it is definetly worth to spend efforts in reducing the amount of annual Spam Emails. I will do my best to do so and start upgrading our spam-filters now