Comment : McAfee's Spam Calculation Full of Hot Air?

McAfee has published a 12-page report, compiled in collaboration with ICF international, which shows that the carbon footprint of every single spam message is 0.3 grams of carbon dioxide.

This multiplied by the estimated 62 trillion spam emails opened a Pandora box of figures and statistics, one more impressive and frightening than the other. For example, the report found out that one-fifth of the annual energy used by a medium-size business on email is associated with spam.

It is interesting to find out how McAfee and ICF worked their way to the final figure of 0.3 grams of green house gas. The first paragraph of the page 6 of the report spells it out. The energy use associated with each state in the Spam's life cycle was calculated. Then the appropriate emissions intensity to the total energy associated with spam and spam filtering was applied.

In other words, there was quite a few approximations and many extrapolations. Singularly, the report pinpoints the process of end-users deleting spam and searching for legitimate email, otherwise known as false positives, as the main generator of spam's CO2-equivalent emissions.

But that's not all. Spam, although very much present in our lives, occupies less and less headlines. Most of the job is done in the backend of email service providers which have not only made life more difficult for spammers but also, for many including myself, make the process of clearing out spam a distant memory. Gmail's spam system for example catches very few, if any genuine emails and allows the odd spam email to go through.