Buy A Spam Filter, Save The Environment
The McAfee study, "Carbon Footprint of Spam," conducted in tandem with climate-change consultant ICF International, explored the impact that the 62 trillion spam e-mails sent in 2008 had on the environment by quantifying electrical output and carbon emissions.
Altogether, the McAfee study indicated that the annual energy output used to transmit, process and filter spam totaled 33 billion kilowatt-hours -- the equivalent to the electricity used in 2.4 million homes. Meanwhile, the effects of spam amounted to the same greenhouse gas emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars running on 2 billion gallons of gasoline.
McAfee security experts took a controversial approach, aiming to get different audiences thinking about the far-reaching effects of spam in new ways.
"It's getting people to think about spam in an entirely different way," said Dave Marcus, security research and communications manager for McAfee. "This is just a new way of letting people see there is a natural quantifiable impact to the environment."
Specifically, the report, which looked at the global energy output associated with spam across 11 countries, found that the average greenhouse gas emission from a single spam message totaled .3 grams of CO2, or the equivalent of driving 3 feet in a car. However, when multiplied by the annual volume of spam, the energy output is like driving around the world 1.6 million times, the study found.
In addition, the study showed that nearly 80 percent of the energy consumption associated with spam comes from end users deleting messages and searching for legitimate e-mails.
"It really does bring the issue home," Marcus said. "You look at business -- medium and large business can have 500,000 users. Those numbers add up."
Marcus said that users often aren't aware of spam's impact because the effects are largely intangible. That is, they are unaware until they "take into consideration the established science and math," Marcus said. "People are concerned about the environment. This is a way of tying cybercime and spam into that kind of argument."
The study also found that spam filtering saved the same amount of electricity as taking 13 million cars off the road and concluded that if every in-box was protected by a state-of-the-art spam filter, spam energy consumption could be reduced by 75 percent per year -- or the equivalent of taking 2.3 million cars off the road.
Marcus added that the study doesn't just promote a solution, noting that there is a strong user education and behavior component that can be extracted from the findings. For example, he said, users could prevent spam from being sent by being cognizant of where they distribute their e-mail addresses, and to whom.
"It's important in both technology and education," Marcus said. "There are user behaviors that can be taught and modified. That's also an important message."