The report looked at the energy expended to create, store, view and filter spam on personal computers and servers across 11 countries, including Australia, China, France, the US and the UK. It found that the level of spam-related emissions generated in these countries is proportionate to its number of email users and the percentage of email that is spam, making it possible to estimate the total energy used by spam worldwide.

Nearly 80 per cent of the energy used by spam comes from end-users deleting it from their inboxes and hunting for legitimate email. While spam filtering software takes up a further 16 per cent, it also reduces the overall energy impact of unsolicited email.

The annual energy used to transmit, process and filter spam totals 33 billion kilowatt-hours, the report concludes, which is equivalent to driving around the Earth 1.6 million times or the energy usage of more than 2 million typical homes.

Full story at: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16951-spam-tramples-environment-with-huge-carbon-footprint.html

via Jon Sumby
THE 62 trillion spam emails sent in 2008 created carbon emissions equivalent to that of 2 billion gallons [7 billion litres] of petrol burnt in a car engine, according to a report (attached) by computer security firm McAfee.