The Carbon Foot Print Of Spam

Despite the recent capture of Spam king Sanford Wallace there has been no noticeable decrease in those unsolicited @ messages from obscure Twitter accounts, or e-mails offering discretely packaged Viagra.

Everyone with an e-mail address has received spam. For some people it’s the chain letter from a work colleague urging you to forward it on or receive bad luck. Other examples generally involve Nigerian royalty. Regardless of the message Spam is annoying and takes up valuable time.

While there is no shortage of reasons to hate Spam two studies from 2009 have provided us with yet another. The studies in question managed to quantify the carbon footprint of the millions of unsolicited mails sent daily.

The facts from the study are eye opening and as the world moves towards reducing its carbon output the dirty little truth about Spam becomes even more annoying. While these stats are unlikely to dissuade Viagra salesmen from targeting your inbox. One can only hope that your family, friends and colleagues might think twice before circulating the most recent chain letter.

The facts below reference two studies from 2009 compiled by McAfee and Earth2tech. These stats haven’t been updated since, but one can imagine how the numbers have increased with internet growth over the last two years.

Below are the key stats from the studies.

From Mcafee Lab Blog -  (15 April 2009)

The average greenhouse gas (GHG) emission associated with a single spam message is 0.3 grams of carbon dioxide CO2. That’s like driving one metre; but when multiplied by the yearly volume of spam, that amount is equivalent to driving around the Earth 1.6 million times.

The filtering of spam in the US alone has the same carbon footprint as 2.4 million homes using electricity or the gas emissions of 3.1 million passenger cars using two billion gallons of petrol.

Much of the energy consumption associated with spam (nearly 80 percent) comes from users deleting spam and searching for legitimate email (false-positives).

Spam filtering accounts for just 16 percent of spam-related energy use.

Spam filtering saves 135 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity per year. That is equivalent to taking 13 million cars off the road.

If every inbox were protected by a state-of-the-art spam filter, organisations and individuals could reduce today’s spam energy by 75 percent or 25 TWh per year, the equivalent of taking 2.3 million cars off the road.

From Earth2tech - (17th April 2009)

The average normal email emits around 4 grams of carbon. Regular e-mail requires a lot more energy than spam email.

Google has said that an average Google search query results in about 0.2 grams of CO2 emissions.

Always-on web services like our dearly-beloved Twitter suck up considerable energy, too.

Image Credit: Cnet News

However , the reality is that if your computer is already on, the polluting effect of spam is significantly decreased. Since much of the spam figures factor in turning on ones computer to check your email. Since many of us don’t turn our computers on simply to check our spam, you may begin to feel the above mentioned facts are exaggerated.

Spam isn’t helping our planet, but if global warming is something that keeps you up at night then focus your concerns on the wasted energy used in the cooling of data centers, or inefficient IT hardware. It’s a much bigger culprit.