as if they aren’t bother some enough

So, you just get to your desk, whether at home or work.  You open up your email to see that you have 22 new messages… and, then you see that 15 of them are span and you have to go through the process of delete, delete…. de… lete.

It is annoying and a waste of time.  

But there are indications that it is also a harm on our planet, according to The San Francisco Chronicle:

 

A report being released Wednesday by security company McAfee Inc. finds that spammers are a scourge to your inbox and the environment, generating an astounding 62 trillion junk e-mails in 2008 that wasted enough electricity to power 2.4 million U.S. homes for a year.

The “Carbon Footprint of E-mail Spam Report” estimated the computational power needed to process spam — from criminals tapping their armies of infected PCs to send it, Internet providers transmitting it, and end users viewing and deleting it.

The report concluded that the electricity needed to process a single spam message results in 0.3 grams of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere — the equivalent of driving 3 feet in a car.

So, the next time you get spam… just get more mad thinking that the energy could have been used to power your home.  oh. well.