0 Comments The Carbon Footprint of Spam…

We all know how irritating Spam can be. No matter what filters you use, there will always be some new spammer who find its way into your inbox. Have you ever wondered how much time and resources the world spends on creating and sending Spam and on preventing Spam from entering our mailboxes?

Image Courtesy: ICF/McAfee

According to the estimates of a recent report (PDF: 2.33 MB) by ICF International (commissioned by McAfee Inc.), approximately 62 trillion spam emails were sent out in 2008. The report estimates the global carbon footprint of these spam emails as well as the estimated savings by the use of spam filters.

Here are some key findings:

• Annual energy use on Spam – 33 Terawatt Hours (TWh) or 33 Billion KWh – equivalent to the energy consumption of 2.4 Million US homes.
• If this energy is assumed to be produced from coal-based power plants, the Green House Gases (GHG) emitted would equal the GHG emission of 3.1 Million passenger cars using 2 Billion US gallons of gasoline.
• The same gasoline could be used to drive around the planet 1.6 Million times.
• Spam filters annually save the planet 135 TWh of electricity – the impact equivalent to taking 13 million cars off the roads.
• For a typical medium-sized business (presumably, in the US), the annual energy consumption on emails is roughly 50,000 KWh – 20 percent of which can be attributed to Spam.

The Economist ran an article on the report (link requires subscription) and some of the reader comments are really interesting.

• What incentives do spammers have to send messages that can be easily filtered? One of the readers points out that even if 1 in 12.5 million messages leads to a real sale (of pills, for example), sending spam is worth the effort. Spammers not only make money from selling the pill but often much more by getting access to your financial information (credit card number) and its misuse. The fact that the marginal cost of generating and delivering spam to every additional person is so low (economies of scale?) makes it worthwhile.
• Another reader is very apologetic about his own comment when he quips, “I apologise for the CO₂ produced in my typing, and hence readers reading, this comment.”

Now, coming from McAfee Inc., these results are not very surprising. That Spam Filters save GHG emissions equivalent to removing more than 3 million cars is excellent news indeed – but to what effect? Spam is a “created paper tiger” that McAfee et al. shoot down and in the process make huge profits. Obviously, they are not doing this to “save the planet”. But then again, as Michael Douglas says in Wall Street, “Anything worth doing, is worth doing for money”.