Gregory's Server"One of the main factors that determines the carbon footprint of an email is its size. The larger the email, the more data it transfers, and the more energy it consumes. For example, a simple text email of 1 KB (kilobyte) can emit about 0.3 grams of CO2, while a rich email with images, attachments, and HTML of 1 MB (megabyte) can emit about 300 grams of CO2. That's a thousand times more! Reducing the size of your email can significantly lower its environmental impact."
https://www.linkedin.com/advice/0/how-do-you-make-your-email-design-carbon-efficient
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 @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. |
@gerrymcgovern We think of email as carbon neutral! Of course it uses... electricity!