The annual energy used to transmit, process and filter spam e-mails results in the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars using 2 billion gallons of gasoline, according to new research.
So those annoying messages aren’t just cluttering your inbox, they’re damaging the planet, too.
In the “Carbon Footprint of Spam” study released Wednesday by McAfee, Inc. (NYSE: MFE), researchers calculated the annual energy used globally for spam totals 33 terawatt hours (TWh)–enough energy to power 2.4 million homes each year.
“As the world faces the growing problem of climate change, this study highlights that spam has an immense financial, personal and environmental impact on businesses and individuals,” said Jeff Green, senior vice president of product development and McAfee Avert Labs. “Stopping spam at its source, as well investing in state-of-the-art spam filtering technology, will save time and money, and will pay dividends to the planet by reducing carbon emissions as well.”
In late 2008, McColo, a major source of online spam, was taken offline and global spam volume dropped 70 percent. The energy saved in the ensuing lull before spammers rebuilt their sending capacity, equated to taking 2.2 million cars off the road that day, proving the impact of the 62 trillion spam e-mails that are sent each year.
The “Carbon Footprint of Spam” study looked at global energy expended to create, store, view and filter spam across 11 countries, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, India, Mexico, Spain, the United States and the United Kingdom. It correlated the electricity spent on spam with its carbon footprint, since fossil fuels are by far the largest source of electricity in the world today. Since emissions cannot be isolated to one country, it averaged its findings to arrive at the global impact. Key findings of the tudy included:
- The average greenhouse gas (GHG) emission associated with a single spam message is 0.3 grams of carbon dioxide (CO2). That’s like driving three feet (one meter); but when multiplied by the yearly volume of spam, it is equivalent to driving around the earth 1.6 million times.
- Much of the energy consumption associated with spam (nearly 80%) comes from end-users deleting spam and searching for legitimate e-mail (false positives). Spam filtering accounts for just 16% of spam-related energy use.
- Spam filtering saves 135 TWh of electricity per year. That is equivalent to taking 13 million cars off the road.
- Countries with greater Internet connectivity and users, such as the United States and India, tended to have proportionately higher emissions per e-mail users. The United States for example, had emissions that were 38 times that of Spain.
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