“spam”– “unsolicited usually commercial messages (such as emails, text messages, or Internet postings) sent to a large number of recipients or posted in a large number of places”–Merriam Webster Dictionary
Spam is almost as old as the internet, and email, itself. It has become such a large problem that most email systems like G-Mail have a “spam” tab. Gmail’s software detects certain words and formats and pushes them to the spam folder. (In the meantime, some legitimate emails may be incorrectly filtered into this folder). As much as 80% of all emails are officially spam, according to Talos.
Spam is not just a problem in the U.S. Every place in the world where email is used has similar trouble.
Today Testing recently released research which looked at both spam volumes and their carbon foot prints. It quotes a BBC interview in which Mike Berners-Lee, a fellow at Lancaster University, said: “…the footprint of an email also varies dramatically, from 0.3g CO2e for a spam email to 4g (0.14oz) CO2e for a regular email and 50g (1.7oz) CO2e for one with a photo or hefty attachment…”
The study’s conclusion is that “spam emails are responsible for 29.7 million metric tons of CO2e emissions each year”. It is also an amount of energy equivalent to that needed to power 5.8 million homes for a year.
One of the questions the researchers asked was does the amount of spam a nation produces have a direct relationship with population? The answer is “no”. China, the fourth largest country in the world with 7.38 billion spam e-mails a day. India, the second largest country by population does not even rank in the top 10.
The country that produces the most spam is the U.S. at 8.13 billion a day. It is followed by Germany at 7.61 billion a day, and Austria at 7.41 billion a day. The study does not explain if the figure is so high in Austria is that German is its official language.
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