Pollution By Another Means
McAfee Inc., a computer security company, has just released its study “The Carbon Footprint of E-mail Spam” in which it reports that spammers generated approximately 62 trillion junk e-mail messages in 2008 that consumed electricity sufficient to power 2.4 million U.S. homes for a year. This wasted energy, that computers consume while users are viewing, deleting or sifting through spam generates needless greenhouse emissions. Spam filters block out most spam from ever reaching their destination; nevertheless, because most e-mail is spam, people spend about 100 billion user-hours annually dealing with the spam that makes it through the filters to their inboxes. According to Microsoft, 97% of e-mail is spam.
What can we do? I like the suggestions put forward by Seth Goldin in his book, Small Is the New Big, in which he calls for accountability, as anonymous strangers have made our lives miserable. Anonymous e-mail messages that clog our inboxes would go away if it could be traced to those who send it. So he suggests a parallel Internet where the only participants are those who verify their identities. Google, he suggests, could sell its G-mail accounts for $1, requiring people to pay with credit cards to verify their identities. Then you would only accept messages from such verifiable senders. Let’s hope his suggestion is implemented by the tech companies; they would quickly build user loyalty as we are all eager to end this abuse of our time.
