Spam kills climate: 0.3 grams of CO2 per message
Not only is spam a nuisance and sometimes criminally deceptive, it’s got a carbon footprint. The mere act of people around the world deleting spam and searching for legitimate e-mail falsely labeled as junk creates the annual energy consumption equivalent in the U.S. of 2.4 million homes using electricity and the same greenhouse gas emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars using two billion gallons of gas. That’s according to “The Carbon Footprint of Email Spam Report” conducted by climate-change consultants ICF and commissioned by security vendor McAfee. The average greenhouse gas emission associated with one spam message is 0.3 grams of CO2, about the same as driving three feet in equivalent emissions. When multiplied by the 62 trillion spam e-mails sent globally, that is like driving around the Earth 1.6 million times.
Eighty percent of the energy consumption associated with spam messages come from people having to do spam maintenance, the report found. Spam filtering accounts for only 16 percent of the energy use and saves the electrical equivalent of taking 13 million cars off the road per year. If spam filters were used universally, the energy saved would be equivalent to taking 2.3 million cars off the road, the report said. When major spam-hosting provider McColo was taken offline last November, global spam volume dropped by 70 percent overnight. That was the equivalent of taking 2.2 million cars off the road. Unfortunately, spam levels are back up as the spammers found other places to host their spam command-and-control servers.
Source: Cnet
Comments(23)
This is unbelivable and devestating.. Not.
what about the percentage of co2 per viewing online porn?
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this report it's so so so so stupid
It's not like people shut down their PCs if they don't have spam
All I can say is, I'm jumping up and down with indifference.
This has to be the most stupid way of drawing conclusions ever.. and also the worst every try @ marketing.
man made global warming is bull.
Im gonna spam this to all my friend and hope if they read this, they never will send me some of their stupid spam emails!! Yesterday i got a spam mail like this:
http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/blmsaol.htm
HOW CAN PEOPLE BE SO STUPID!! :S
what a pointless article.. surely the posting of this adds to global warming also then.
Well it was interesting enough to read. I thought the article was interesting but highly doubt spammers are going to stop because of global warming and spam is enough of a nuisance that people take measures to reduce their spam.
…the dumbest thing I've ever read.
Like every PC in the world gets turned off when people aren't reading spam. They'd be on anyway.
IMHO,
Man-made global warming is real, but people don't want to believe that they're killing the earth. But, spam's contribution to greenhouse gases are sooo insignificant as a percentage, it is ridiculous to spend time on the subject.
I thinks this is BS.
I dont see that if a computer is on-it used electricy-if you are viewing spam, the electricity the computer is using will not go up…. so dumb.
What's a good spam email filter for outlook? As I tried a few but are crap. My ISP crap at blocking them! When a I set up rules in outlook to look for certain words in a message & to delete them, it does not!
Help
CO2 is an extremely destructive force, look what it does to trees, flowers, and other plants! It's horrific! Nothing has more of an effect on the earths temperature than CO2! Sunspot activity? Only a fool would think that huge extra explosions of plasma could affect the earths overall temperature, rubbish!!
steve – you are stupid.
ggman, its too insecure, use webmail. gmail is ok.
I think I've released enough CO2 by throwing a lot of pencils,wasted printer ink by printing some stuff and then threw it out, etc. Man, how I'm going to stop? dont't blame us, blame the factories.
April Fools two was 2 weeks ago. Funny read thanks for the laugh
WAT THE FCK?were did u pull this out from?The Cartoon Network?
And who's the stupid sonofabich who made this report?What was he/she thinking?That those who are going to read this are a bunch of vegetables?
On hindsight,I totally respect this report.My only point of contempt is the fact that I believe Alien Invasion and me-picking-my-nose leaves a higher carbon footprint than Spams.Yea…its true!!
wat dmbfcks!!!!!!
Probably, this thread and all of its answers caused several grams of CO2. You can see problems everywhere. Even the study to find out that spam causes CO2 made lots of it. Hippocrit, isn't it? Like death-sentence…
I'd love to see the math peice of that calculation.
Reading the pirates critical view makes my heart warm!
Before i clicked "comments", i was like "3rd comment or less, someone yells BS!"
Yeah, this is pretty foolish. It's like when they say that 400 billion dollars are lost annually because of people surfing the internet or reading e-mail at work. If people weren't wasting their time on the internet they would find some other way to kill time at work.
What we really need is a 20 hour work week. Where you go in and bust your ass for four hours a day non-stop! Then everyone gets to leave and do whatever they want. Humans are not meant to sit at a desk eight hours a day working without interruption. There are a select few who can do it though, but let them get a 2nd 'four hour job'.