Spam study's scary CO2 numbers

In a special IT Blogwatch Extra, Richi Jennings watches bloggers debate the carbon footprint of spam and spam filtering. Not to mention another Photoshop disaster...

Here's some Sumner Lemon aid:

If annoying users and wasting their time wasn't bad enough, spam e-mails are also responsible for clogging our atmosphere with carbon dioxide, a gas that shoulders much of the blame for global warming, according to a report commissioned by antivirus vendor McAfee.
...
The McAfee report, which was written by consulting company ICF International, said the estimated 62 trillion spam e-mail that get sent each year consume 33 billion kilowatt hours of electricity, enough to power 2.4 million homes. In addition, spam e-mail releases as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as 3.1 million cars consuming 2 billion gallons of gasoline.

John Leyden has more:

The international survey suggests the carbon footprint of a single spam message is 0.3 grams of CO2. More than half (52 per cent) of the energy consumption associated with junk mail comes from end-users deleting spam and searching for legitimate email, with spam filtering accounting for just 16 per cent of spam-related energy use. So, the argument goes, if more people used efficient inbox spam filters then even more energy might be saved.
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ICF reckons more than one-fifth of the annual energy used at a medium-size business on email is associated with spam. It estimates an average business email user is responsible for 131kg of CO2 per year in email-related emissions, one-fifth (or 22 per) is related to spam.

mea37 wonders if it smells right:

The majority of the energy is spent reading the spam and searching spam folders for legit mail, right?

So where is that energy coming from / going? Perhaps you're counting the energy of running my PC while I'm doing those things? But what's your "0 energy" baseline?

Richi Jennings advised McAfee: [Hmm, that name sounds familiar -Ed.]

My role in the McAfee project was to help ICF build a model that accurately reflected where energy was used in producing, transmitting, filtering, and dealing with spam ... The data came from my 25 years of experience with email and spam, cross-correlated with data from other researchers (including McAfee and McAfee's competitors).
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In any calculation such as this, there's always the concern that we're double-counting energy that would have been used whether or not there was spam ... The data and calculations were carefully designed so as to only measure energy that is used as a direct result of there being spam. In other words, it is "incremental" energy. PCs and servers use less energy when idle than when doing "work"—in most cases it's this additional energy that we measured.

Stewart Meagher waxes cynical:

A report paid for by McAfee ... has done some mathematical jiggey-pokery and come up with some scary-sounding numbers which are supposed to make us all rush out and buy spam filtering software in order to stop a polar bear from having to eat garbage.

But Ariel Schwartz thinks different:

We're far too reliant on email for communications to completely stop using it, and that's a good thing. The carbon footprint of email is nothing compared to the energy required to transport physical mail--not to mention the paper wasted on mailed letters.

But if we can significantly cut our carbon footprints by switching to spam-filtering email services or installing free software, why not?

And finally...

• Even The Instruments Are Fake

Previously in IT Blogwatch:

• Amazon.com: FAIL and you
• Windows 7? Not this year.
• Twitter reels from Mikeyy's XSS 'sploits
• ...more

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Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/adviser/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and spam. A 23 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. You can follow him on Twitter, pretend to be Richi's friend on Facebook, or just use boring old email: blogwatch@richi.co.uk.