The carbon footprint of spam

There is an interesting whitepaper available from McAfee and ICF. Albeit it´s from an vendor of security software, it provides some interesting points:

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

By the way, I think nobody wants to make advertisements for it´s hardware with “Greener SPAM … the products of Vendor X are capable to send out 50% more spam with 50% less energy”. But it should give us an additional incentive to think about some more effective means to fight spam. (via: Slashme and polaine.com)