Spam Email Messages Have A High Carbon Footprint
According to a recent study performed by McAfee, Inc. regarding the environmental impact of energy consumption determined by the existence of spam email messages, resulted that spam emails generates a high amount of green house gases emmisions. Practically, the annual energy necessary to transmit, process and filter spam is equivalent with the energy used in 2.4 million homes. The quantity of green house gases generated is the same as in case of 3.1 million cars which had consumed 2 billion gallons of gasoline.
In a recent statement, Jeff Green, senior vice president of product development and McAfee Avert Labs, underlines the danger of spam email messages, which represents a serious environmental problem and the necessity of better spam filtering mechanisms: “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. 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.”
The McAfee study, entitled “Carbon Footprint of Spam” has taken into account 11 countries to estimate the energy consumed to create, store, view and filter spam. The electricity consumption associated to the spam email related actions, was correlated to the corresponding carbon footprint.
A summary of the main results are presented in the next list:
-a single spam message generates 0.3 grams of CO2
-the highest quantity of energy is consumed in case of spam messages deletion
-spam filtering saves 135 TWh of electricity per year
-countries with a higher number of Internet users consume more energy
In conclusion, spam email messages must be managed in an optimal manner by the users who receive them, as well as email servers administrators, through effective spam filters, because this method implies the consumption of a lower quantity of electrical energy.
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