Re-examining the environmental impact of Spam
SYNAQ Spam Index Q1 2010
(SYNAQ Spam Index - Q1 2010)
There are a lot of great articles on the web talking about spam's impact on the environment, and one of the things that comes across immediately when you read them, is the negative impact when spam protection is not implemented for a user. Based on research findings it has been determined that the greatest environmental cost from spam (energy consumed, Green House Gas emissions and so on) is generated by users reading through junk mail, deleting junk mail, and looking for false positives (clean or valid email).
Here are some key findings (2008 McAffee/ICE Report Data):
- An estimated worldwide total of 62 trillion spam emails were sent in 2008
- Globally, annual spam energy use totals 33 billion kilowatt-hours (KWh), or 33 terawatt hours (TWh) That’s equivalent to the electricity used in 2.4 million homes in the United States, with the same Green House Gas (GHG) emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars using 8.8 billion liters of petrol
- Spam filtering saves 135 TWh of electricity per year. That’s like taking 13 million cars off the road
- If every inbox were protected by a state-of-the-art spam filter, organizations and individuals could reduce today’s spam energy by approximately 75 percent or 25 TWh per year. That’s equivalent to taking 2.3 million cars off the road
- The average GHG emission associated with a single spam message is 0.3 grams of CO2, and when multiplied by the annual volume of spam, that's equivalent to driving around the Earth 1.6 million times
- A year’s email at a typical medium-size business uses 50,000 KWh; more than one fifth of that annual use can be associated with spam
- Filtering spam is beneficial, but fighting spam at the source is even better. When McColo, a major source of online spam, was taken offline in late 2008, the energy saved in the ensuing lull — before spammers rebuilt their sending capacity — equated to taking 2.2 million cars off the road
- Much of the energy consumption associated with spam (80 percent) comes from end-users deleting spam and searching for legitimate email (false positives)
- Spam filtering accounts for just 16 percent of spam related energy use
Reviewing our SPAM index for Q1 2010, and taking into account that SYNAQ's Pinpoint SecureMail anti spam service has a negligible false positive rate of 0,003%, we can see that our contribution to the reduction of GHG emissions while globally small is still significant.
Based on data taken from the McAffee/ICE Report, our service is removing, on average, 0,24g (0,3g * 80%) of GHG emissions from the atmosphere for each spam blocked. This translates into:
- JAN-2010: 72.3 million spam's blocked = 17 tons of CO2 saved
- FEB-2010: 66.6 million spam's blocked = 16 tons of CO2 saved
- MAR-2010: 69,3 million spam's blocked = 16.6 tons of CO2 saved
Grand Total for Q1 2010: 49,6 tons of CO2 emissions saved.
Now that's what I call a software service. Cleaning your inbox and saving the planet at the same time.
Tags: Spam Index