The eco-impact of spam mail

Monty Python was dead wrong: spam is neither lovely, nor wonderful.

 
Spam e-mail is one of the four horsemen of the e-apocalypse. Who hasn’t received unwanted ads for male “enhancement,” college degrees, or sales in stores located in another time zone?

It turns out, spam email isn’t just annoying, but harmful to the environment. McAfee Inc. released the results of a study of the effects of spam, and it ain’t pretty – spam actually contributes to greenhouse gas emissions.

As a major antivirus software developer, McAfee knows a thing or two about spam. “The Carbon Footprint of Spam” indicates the energy consumed by creating, sending, and eventually dealing with spam is significant. Annually, it amounts to about 33 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh).

That’s a big and somewhat abstract number, so think of it this way: that’s around as much electricity as 2.4 million homes consume each year. If you prefer your numbers small, McAfee discovered that each individual spam message (indirectly) produces 0.3 grams of carbon dioxide.

That’s not much, you might think – the equivalent of driving your car one metre. But that’s for a single spam message, sent to one inbox. The annual volume of spam, according to the study, is the equivalent of driving around the planet 1,600,000 times.

What does all this mean? Quantifying the real environmental impact of spam may assist or even propel efforts to hold those responsible….well, responsible.

Annoying people isn’t (currently) a crime, but needlessly damaging the environment is.