The Carbon Footprint of Spam

Source: David Marcus @ McAfee

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Here are some excerpts from the article!
NOTE: These are just excerpts. For a
better understanding of the information
please download the article (pdf) from
McAfee.
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Key Findings
• An estimated worldwide total of 62 trillion spam emails
were sent in 2008
• Globally, annual spam energy use totals 33 billion kilowatt-
hours (KWh), or 33 terawatt hours (TWh). That’s
equivalent to the electricity used in 2.4 million homes
in the United States, with the same GHG emissions
as 3.1 million passenger cars using two billion United
States gallons of gasoline
• Spam filtering saves 135 TWh of electricity per year.
That’s like taking 13 million cars off the road
• If every inbox were protected by a state-of-the-art
spam filter, organizations and individuals could reduce
today’s spam energy by approximately 75 percent or
25 TWh per year. That’s equivalent to taking 2.3 million
cars off the road
• The average GHG emission associated with a single
spam message is 0.3 grams of CO2. That’s like driving
three feet (one meter) in equivalent emissions, but
when multiplied by the annual volume of spam, it’s like
driving around the Earth 1.6 million times
• A year’s email at a typical medium-size business uses
50,000 KWh; more than one fifth of that annual use
can be associated with spam
• Filtering spam is beneficial, but fighting spam at the
source is even better. When McColo, a major source of
online spam, was taken offline in late 2008, the energy
saved in the ensuing lull — before spammers rebuilt their
sending capacity — equated to taking 2.2 million cars
off the road
• Much of the energy consumption associated with
spam (80 percent) comes from end-users deleting
spam and searching for legitimate email (false positives).
Spam filtering accounts for just 16 percent of spam-related
energy use

Abstract:

All email users throughout the world, including consumers and
businesses, struggle with the scourge of spam email. The costs and
risks associated with spam have been well documented and have
led to attempts by both government and private industry to curtail
spam, notably the United States legislature’s CAN-SPAM Act of 2003
and proposals ranging from large email providers banding together
to implement sender authentication systems to pay-to-send models.

Until McAfee® commissioned ICF International to
study the global environmental impact of spam
email, the focus has been on the financial fallout
from spam. ICF’s study determined that taking
measures to discourage spam — which accounts
for 80 percent of all emails — not only saves
organizations and individual email users time and
money but can lead to meaningful reductions
in energy use and resulting greenhouse gas
(GHG) emissions.

By taking an environmental approach to the cost
of spam, McAfee hopes to aid the decision makers
who are working to stem the tide of spam email
and open a timely conversation on the costs of
email spam to the planet. This white paper starts
that conversation by discussing key findings from
the ICF report.

Summary:

Email spam is a significant problem for both individual
users and businesses. Its financial impact
and, in the case of some phishing schemes, the
personal pain and loss has been the subject of
many research studies. But until McAfee commissioned
climate-change consultant ICF International
and spam expert Richi Jennings to calculate the
environmental impact of spam, spam’s contribution
to GHG emissions had been largely ignored.

This report looks at global energy expended to
create, store, view and filter spam. ICF calculated
the GHG emissions associated with this energy
use, resulting primarily from the burning of fossil
fuels for electricity generation.

This white paper uses the ICF analysis to make
a compelling argument for stopping spam at its
source as well investing in state-of-the-art spam
filtering technology, which not only saves time
and money but can pay off in big dividends to
the planet by reducing the carbon footprint of
email spam.

A Day without Spam:

On November 11, 2008, McColo Inc., a United States-based web hosting provider notorious for its prolific contribution to email spam, was taken offline by its upstream Internet Service Provider (ISP). Overnight, global spam volume dropped by 70 percent. The most obvious benefit of the shutdown for practically anyone with an email address was an immediate reduction in unsolicited junk messages. At the same time, the planet experienced a less obvious environmental benefit. For every spam email not sent, an associated reduction in electricity use, and therefore carbon emissions, took place.

The substantial, though temporary, drop in total
spam traffic that accompanied the disconnection
was a decided relief for individual email users and
organizations worldwide. It also spelled relief for
the planet, according to ICF, who equated this
reduced spam traffic to taking 2.2 million passenger
vehicles off the road. While distributing
spam does not require shipping physical goods,
it does require innumerable pieces of computer
hardware — for sending spam, moving it across
the Internet, processing it, storing it, viewing it
and filtering it out.

As the world struggles with everything from
climate change to increased industrialization in
developing countries, McAfee believes the time is
ripe for looking at the global impact of an annual
62 trillion spam emails and asking the question,
“What is the environmental benefit of blocking
email spam?”

The Carbon Footprint of Spam:

The ICF report associates 0.3 grams of CO2 emissions with
the average spam message. Granted, ICF associates the average
legitimate email with almost four grams of CO2. However,
spam email accounts for just over one-third of the total
emissions related to business and personal email globally
because about 80 percent of all email messages are spam
messages.

The average business email user is responsible for
131 kg of CO2 per year in email-related emissions
and 22 percent of that figure is spam-related. The
ICF report equates this spam energy to the emissions
that would result if every business email user
burned an extra 3.3 gallons of gasoline annually.

The energy required annually to create, send,
receive, store, and view spam adds up to more
than 33 billion KWh, approximately equivalent
to 4 gigawatts of baseload power generation or
the power provided by four large new coal power
plants. ICF estimates spam-related emissions for
all email users at an annual total of 17 million
metric tons of CO2 or 0.2 percent of the total
global CO2 emissions — a number equivalent to
emissions from approximately 1.5 million in the
United States homes.

Emissions sources that are key contributors
to spam’s carbon footprint are:
• Harvesting addresses
• Creating spam campaigns
• Sending spam from zombies and mail servers
• Transmitting spam from sender to receiver
via the Internet
• Processing of spam by incoming mail servers
• Storing messages
• Viewing and deleting spam
• Filtering spam and searching for false positives

Annual global spam footprint
is equivalent to 3 million passenger
vehicles on the road annually.

Analyzing the data:

To determine the carbon footprint of spam, ICF,
with the assistance of McAfee, calculated the
energy use associated with each stage in spam’s
life cycle, then applied the appropriate emissions
intensity to the total energy associated with spam
and spam filtering. The results demonstrate that
the average GHG emissions per spam message
total 0.3 grams of CO2-equivalent (CO2-e).

The report attributes an overwhelming majority of
spam’s GHG emissions — nearly 80 percent — to
energy used in the process of viewing and deleting
spam or searching for legitimate email erroneously
trapped in spam filters (false positives).

For further detail on the methodology ICF followed,
see the McAfee / ICF International report, Carbon
Footprint of Spam Email.

Annual global impact:

The McAfee / ICF study examines spam in 11
countries and, since emissions cannot be isolated
to one country, averages its findings to arrive at
global impact. According to the study, the level of
spam-related emissions generated in any country
is usually proportionate to the number of email
users in each country and the percentage of a
country’s email that is spam. Countries with greater
Internet connectivity tend to have more email
users, and countries where a greater percentage
of incoming email is spam have proportionally
higher emissions per email user.

Countries with greater numbers of
email users generally use more energy
for a global average of 22 kWh per
user per year.

Countries with more email users generally use
more energy for a global average of 22 kWh per
user per year. Variations among countries are due
in large part to the differences in the percentage
of spam emails received in each country. Not surprisingly,
countries where spam makes up a higher
percentage of all email expend more energy per
user than those countries with lower spam rates.

While the spam that arrives in any individual’s
inbox may create just a small puff of CO2, the puff
multiplied by millions of users worldwide adds up.
Taking careful measures to discourage spammers
worldwide can lead to meaningful reductions in
energy use and GHG emissions and save the world’s
email users time and money.

The average business email user
is responsible for 131 kg of CO2 per
year in email-related emissions
and 22 percent of that figure
is spam-related.

Users viewing and deleting
spam is the largest energy drain
associated with spam, almost
18 billion kWh or 52 percent of
total spam energy.

Users searching for false positives
make up 27 percent of the total
energy use for spam, approximately
9 billion kWh.

A year’s email at a typical mediumsized
business uses 50,000 KWh;
more than one fifth of that annual
use can be associated with spam.

Phases of spam energy use:

ICF divides spam energy use into several phases.
First, spammers harvest email addresses, typically
by “scraping” websites, a process that uses automated
software to download a website’s entire
content and search it for email addresses.

The spammer then creates the spam campaign
by writing the code and creating the copy for the
spam messages. Next, a combination of zombie PCs
(called botnets when they occur in large numbers)
and conventional mail servers send the spam. The
spam messages travel over the Internet hardware
owned by ISPs and other network providers, which
acts as a bridge between sender and receiver.
After reaching the receiver’s network, mail servers
process spam and place it into disk storage. Finally,
energy is also used by spam filtering devices at
several points along and by recipients who must
view and delete spam that has evaded the filters
(false negatives). The recipients also expend energy
searching for legitimate mail caught in spam filters
(false positives).

Users manually sorting, viewing,
and deleting spam:

The ICF study found that the largest single source
of spam-related energy consumption and emissions
comes from end-users viewing and deleting spam.
Manually sorting, viewing and deleting spam, as
well as searching for legitimate email (false positives),
uses almost 18 billion KWh or 52 percent
of total spam-related energy use.

It takes an average of three seconds for a user to
view and delete a spam message. Although spam
filters block approximately 80 percent of spam
before it reaches the user, the massive quantities
of email spam and the increasing ingenuity of
spammers leave a large number of spam messages
in end-user inboxes. Approximately 104 billion
user hours per year go to reading and manually
deleting spam (Jennings, 2008).

An estimated worldwide
total of 62 trillion spam
emails were sent in 2008.

Energy use for spam filtering:

Spam filtering also makes up a significant portion
of PC energy use — approximately 5.5 billion KWh
annually or about 16 percent of overall spam
energy use. But compared to the energy users
consume searching for false positives and viewing
and deleting spam messages, the energy expenditure
of spam filtering seems like a small price
to pay. Spam filtering helps to reduce the overall
number of spam messages, thus decreasing the
time spent manually sorting through the messages
and associated energy use and GHG emissions.

A day without spam filtering would have significant
environmental consequences. If all spam were
allowed to reach inboxes, the time end users would
need to spend clearing spam out of their inboxes
would increase dramatically. Not only would this
circumstance exact a heavy price in lost employee
productivity, but GHG emissions associated with
spam would increase by about five times, because
of the increased computing time required to view
and delete these spam messages.

Conclusion:

Spam email takes a toll on the finances and productivity of private and business email users all over the world. It also is a significant drain on the global environment. Because this impact is largely a result of the amount of time end users spend searching for and deleting spam, investments in next-generation spam filtering technology can pay big dividends — in economic terms and in a positive impact on the carbon footprint of spam.