Gregory's Server"Its estimated that spam consumes more than 33 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity every year, the same amount as 2.4 million homes. It also produces the same amount of green house gas(GHG) emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars."
https://www.techbusinessnews.com.au/does-email-spam-affect-the-enviroment/
 48 comments
"With email attachments representing, very conservatively, around 17,000 files per worker per year, we conclude that in a 1,000-person company a staggering 17 million file copies are created every year as a result of email’s file-sharing methodology." @gerrymcgovern IMO the most useless of those are picture attachments that are just a signature: name of the company, and contact information which has to be read only with human eyes, as this task is much more complex for computer than for human :)  @alexcleac That reminds me of a company I used to work for. Our department (IT) closely followed the amount of space needed on our mail server. Whenever space became less than about 6 months worth of new emails, we'd expand the virtual disk so that there would be enough room for approximately another year. Our marketing department decided that everyone should use a uniform signature including the company logo 1/2  @gerrymcgovern Good summary & I get it (and am not debating the fundamental premise that more efficient emails are a good thing). To further the study though, have you found any supporting & comparative data that contrasts how much energy would be used to transmit said information via other mechanisms? I'd be interested in seeing how the throughput of Slack  @dvolps @gerrymcgovern one issue with email specifically, is it only transports text-encoded data, not pure binary, so binary attachments need to be converted to base64 (and i think encoded in utf-7?), which is quite wasteful, and iirc can increase volume by 30% or so. @CodexArcanum @dvolps and they said Slack was an email killer. Now I get slack emails reminding me to visit slack. Least damaging way to send a digital message is SMS, I’ve read @dvolps there’s so much we could do if we truly focused on reducing waste in digital design @gerrymcgovern yeah, using email as a file sharing mechanism is catastrophic, while it is sometimes a life saver as a accidental backup system, we really shouldn't need that, it's certainly hard to design something better, but i like what wetransfer did, quite clever, now the friction is still high enough it only makes sense for big files, but something similar needs to happen automatically with smaller attachments in all the mails we use, and servers should reject big mails like they used to. @gerrymcgovern per wikipedia, total internet traffic was predicted to reach 273 exabytes per month by 2022. let's call it 300 EB/mo this year. (that's considerably less than would be expected from earlier predictions.) if a 1MB email attachment produces 300 g of CO2, Net traffic presumably produces ~90 megatonnes/mo, ~1.08 gt/yr. CO2 emissions from all sources were on the order of 37.5 gt in 2022. i have some difficulty believing that the Net accounts for more than 2% of that. @jonsinger @gerrymcgovern it can come down to sloppy coding that wastes resources. Every clock cycle should count and in the dark ages it did. Now developers barely know how to write efficient code. Looking at you Python and JavaScript. Plus adverts / surveillance on everybody uses vast resources to show us ads for products we don't want to buy. It's estimated that around 80-90% of web traffic is generated by bots sending messages to other bots. Emails are the tip of the iceberg ICT accounts for between 2% and 4% of total emissions. The email analysis is flawed because the emissions of the network are almost independent of the traffic volume. This is because the routers etc are always on (it's a bit different for mobile networks and wifi, but the correlation is still weak).  @gerrymcgovern sorry but that makes no sense at all. 300g is more than some people can eat as a steak. Imagine generating 300g of any substance for 1MB of data, that is impossible to be true. So whatever the base of this calculation is, it's most likely very far of really. @feyter Yeah, I've got figures from Tim Berners Lee estimating 50 g for an attachment. 300 g does sound a lot. And you can thank the Microsoft Corporation for that: they provided the code that 13-year-old Romanian hackers used to build bot-nets. Moving to Linux would stop most of this within a few months. @gerrymcgovern If only the spammers and telemarketers identities were disclosed to the public. Not to be the guy pouring gallons of "THE PROBLEM IS ALWAYS CAPITALISM" dressing all over the salad, but... Every incentive aligns to create spam. End corporate control of the networks. Create strong, private, decentralized networks. Ban international shipping of manufactured garbage. The criminal cartels that sell drugs, porn, and malware all over the net wouldn't exist without the support and tacit acceptance of international government and business.  @gerrymcgovern @cynblogger I read that about 50% is pure spam and 35% is political or marketing junk @gerrymcgovern here is the real source @failedLyndonLaRouchite @gerrymcgovern Thanks! This article is a mess! I wonder if people commenting have read it. Not saying the subject isn't interesting, but the delivery is not good at all. @gerrymcgovern can we now add in the amount consumed by serving and displaying web ads, charging phones that were drained by apps downloading ads, replacing phones whose batteries failed because of those apps... and we can conclude that online advertising is an ecological disaster as well as a psychological harm. @gerrymcgovern Calling for the execution of spammers is no longer hyperbole - now it’s to save the planet  It's why the oil industry is funding attacks on the financial system using bitcoin. Make the global flow of money dependent on the oil industry keeping the electrical grid in operation, and you have the perfect captive consumer base and an exquisite form of extortion. The financial system already sides with this planet-frying industry too much already. Wow, I need to turn on post alerts for you so I don't miss any of these banger, 🤯 replies!  @gerrymcgovern I don't concerned about emissions described about these spam effects calculations. What really concerns me is that:  This is something everyone in office could go after, bipartisan issue... and literally no one would complain.  @gerrymcgovern Is this authored by someone who hates the SI system? What about TWh instead the hard-to-consume “billions”?… @gerrymcgovern IF we required hosting providers to KYC any customer that needs port 25 open outbound, this would end immediately.  @gerrymcgovern I know it’s midweek because it’s when MS’s spam filters don’t work and I get a surplus of junk email straight to my inbox. But they have that sorted, as they focus their resources on AI 🤔 @gerrymcgovern Then SM like TickTock. Why are we getting a Datacentre in Ireland? No excess Electric. So much is fossil fuel. Spam is way behind those! @gerrymcgovern You can’t use data from 2010 to estimate electricity use and emissions for email! From the article: “According to carbon footprint expert Mike Berners-Lee’s 2010 book an year of incoming emails will add 300 pounds of emissions to a person’s carbon footprint, or the equivalent of “driving 200 miles in an average car.””  @gerrymcgovern Is the figure of 4g per email up to date? It's easy to make mistakes with these things, see e.g. grossly exaggerated estimates of the carbon impact of streaming due to multiplying old numbers by new numbers. Where did that figure come from?  @gerrymcgovern Ah hah, say no more. So in other words there is valid reason spam should actually be made illegal. That's all we need. Let's do it humanity. Make spam illegal!  @gerrymcgovern I’m trying to solve this problem with my email service https://port87.com It’s very resistant to spam. Phishing too.   @gerrymcgovern Regulate it as well as junk mail and telemarketing. Do not call list, Do not send mail list. Do not send spam list. Let citizens enroll. Massive $ penalty for first offense, jail time for the second. They will hide behind "free speech" of course.  @gerrymcgovern unwanted emails, unwanted notifications, unwanted physical mailings. Whole economies propped up on annoying us, wasting our time, and eventually killing us. |
The average office worker receives around 144 irrelevant messages per day, of which 24% have attachments. Email attachments sent in copy are accessed only 6% of the time.
https://www.mxhero.com/post/save-the-planet-replace-email-attachments-with-file-share-links