Spam can no longer be looked at as merely an annoyance or an inconvenience.  In "The Carbon Footprint of Email Spam Report" McAfee outlines the global impact spam is having on our environment.  Some of the numbers included in this report are mind boggling and if you didn't hate spam enough already, you will surely despise it after this.

McAfee's report estimates that around 62 trillion spam emails were sent during 2008.  That's a huge number but here is where it really gets crazy. Each and every spam message sent requires energy to be consumed. That energy consumption results in emission of greenhouse gases (GHG) to the atmosphere. To be precise, .3 grams of CO2 is emitted into the atmosphere for every single spam message sent.

Now .3 grams doesn't seem like that much. Its about the same amount of emissions you would release if you drove your car three feet.  Still doesn't seem like that much? If you aren't already doing the math, let me put it in perspective. The emissions from the 62 trillion spam emails sent last year are equivalent to the GHG emitted by your car if you drove around the earth 1.6 million times.  It's the amount of GHG spewed up into the ozone layer by 3.1 million cars consuming over 2 billion gallons of gas.

If you put it in terms of electricity, McAfee's report estimates that 33 billion kilo-watt-hours are used each year in the sending, receiving, sorting and deleting of spam. That is roughly the amount of energy consumed by 2.4 million U.S. homes.

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If you aren't already using a spam filter, this is just more reason to start. The actual filtering of spam accounts for merely 16% of the energy used in spam. The vast majority of spam related energy consumption comes from the sifting, viewing and deletion of unwanted emails. What this means is that anti-spam software is good for the environment. In fact, the impact of spam filtering is equal to taking 13 million cars off of the road.

So if keeping those Viagra emails out of your inbox wasn't enough of a reason to get state-of-the-art anti-spam software on your computer, hopefully this is.