Spam emails are riding on the rails of an existing infrastructure that provides incredible value. I agree that they are wasteful, but damn this is some melodramatic doodoo.
https://www.techbusinessnews.com.au/does-email-spam-affect-the-enviroment/
Its estimated that spam consumes more than 33 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity every year, the same amount as 2.4 million homes. It also produces the same amount of green house gas(GHG) emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars.
Exactly. It’s not a matter of the metal housing this stuff, it’s the sheer volume of traffic and cost that all the noise makes.
Been thinking about this for years. Used to sell data centers. Every watt of power requires another 2 watts to cool down. Legit phishing, spam, junk, has a cost.
4g of CO2 per email? I find that hard to believe. Probably overestimating emissions like some media did with Netflix.
https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-carbon-footprint-of-streaming-video-fact-checking-the-headlines
That is a lot of waste, I certainly underestimated. Another commenter has some insight. Sounds like email spam is less of an issue today simply because it’s moved to other platforms.
I think you’d be surprised how much dedicated infrastructure and labor exists for A) spam, and B) anti-spam.
I used to manage email servers as part of my job, and >95% of traffic was spam. At the time, that seemed to be typical, judging from my discussions with others in the industry. Today I hear the number is closer to 50%, but I suspect that’s because a lot of anti-spam measures are done further upstream (e.g. outgoing mail servers) so a lot of spam never makes it to its target server to begin with. And I guess spamming resources have moved somewhat to other protocols.
We spent thousands of dollars to get dedicated hardware to filter spam, along with a fat support contract for the spam-blocking software. Multiply that by the number of businesses that use email. (Of course, nowadays most businesses use cloud email from either Google or Microsoft, so it’s much more efficient as far as anti-spam goes.)
At another job, I set it all up myself using open-source tools because we couldn’t afford a fancy commercial solution. This reduced upfront cost but greatly increased the hours of labor I had to spend working on it.
Here’s a study from 2012 estimating the cost of spam was about $20 billion per year in America alone: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.26.3.87
We estimate that American firms and consumers experience costs of almost $20 billion annually due to spam. Our figure is more conservative than the $50 billion figure often cited by other authors, and we also note that the figure would be much higher if it were not for private investment in anti-spam technology by firms, which we detail further on. Based on the work of crafty computer scientists who have infiltrated and monitored spammers’ activity, we estimate that spammers and spam-advertised merchants collect gross worldwide revenues on the order of $200 million per year. Thus, the “externality ratio” of external costs to internal benefits for spam is around 100:1.
Huh that’s fascinating, I did underestimate the amount of additional lift. Thanks for the context
“spam emails provide incredible value”
-lemmy contrarians
They’re saying email provides incredible value. Spam merely piggybacks on that.
damn this is some melodramatic doodoo.
As are similar complaints about crypto.
*Wow you guys hated this lol
Nobody tell this guy that they used to be printed on actual paper and physically mailed, he seems like he’s having a hard enough time as it is.
Used to. They still are, but they used to be as well.
wait until he hears about phone books
UNICEF still does that, very happy of the use they make of my money
Ok now do actual physical junk mail
I really have no need to ever check my regular mailbox. It’s all junk mail. Everything else like bills are all online (even things like property taxes)
Physical mailboxes are good for junk mail and for court/legal paperwork. Neither of which I ever want to see.
Your mailbox is now a physical spam filter.
I have a tiny baby mailbox. I know the mailman is just walking away with the rare mail I want if its not empty.
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I think about this for all the work and resources that go into surveillance and psych manipulation on social media platforms.
Unfathomable amounts of hours and resources have been cumulatively spent by society to research the technologies and train the knowledge workers who make all of this possible and for what? Instead of having those smart, educated people do LITERALLY ANYTHING that would contribute to society, they’re spending their time and expertise to make people sadder and angrier to sell ads for things people don’t need. It doesn’t even need to be something “important” like curing diseases or fixing climate change for them to be more valuable than what they’re doing now. As long as it’s not actively making things worse. That’s the bar we’re setting at the moment. And then yeah I guess on top of that it’s probably wasting a lot of material and energy resources too.
just capital
Like, eh, I guess?
Most spam emails are not corporations looking for customers but scammers looking for victims.
I appreciate the dunk on capitalism as much as the next guy but this feels kinda random
not corporations looking for customers but scammers looking for victims
In like 90% of commerce, these are the same thing. Profit exists in the unequal exchange of value. The more unequal the exchange, the more profit created. Capitalism is built on the idea that the investor is entitled to all of the profit, so the producer and the consumer are both providing value to a third party.
For sure, there are examples of industries where the transactions are more equitable than others. But corporations are exclusively profit-driven, and equality is anathema to profit.
I appreciate the dunk on capitalism as much as the next guy but this feels kinda […]
Welcome to the Fediverse!
Mmhm, it’s people trying to make money, not anthropomorphic “capital”. Not especially rich people either.
What value does flooding my spam folder with Swedish spam create for anybody? I just hit delete sometimes.
And while we’re at it what’s with Google Drive Swedish spam?
I once ran a bunch of calculations on the carbon impact of storing things online. There’s a real impact.
Compared to impact of our transportation and food choices, it’s not huge. Though all aspects of carbon emissions are worth addressing.
Some of the big tech companies are aggressively working towards being carbon neutral or carbon negative, including Microsoft, Google and Apple.
We each move the needle some one way or the other ourselves with our daily transportation and food choices… as well as how many more photos we store in the cloud!
Broke my brain
