McAfee has released a fascinating report on the huge carbon footprint of spam. It concludes:
- Users viewing and deleting spam is the largest energy drain associated with spam – manually sorting, viewing and deleting spam, as well as searching for legitimate email, uses almost 18 billion KWh or 52 percent of total spam-related energy use;
- The average business email user is responsible for 131 kg of CO2 per year in email-related emissions and 22 percent of that figure is spam-related;
- Annual global spam footprint is equivalent to 3 million passenger vehicles on the road annually;
- A year’s email at a typical medium sized business uses 50,000 KWh; more than one fifth of that annual use can be associated with spam;
- An estimated worldwide total of 62 trillion spam emails were sent in 2008.
For more details, see Carbon Footprint of Spam. Maybe this will give our governments an incentive to help stamp out spam.