The emissions from this all add up to over 17 million tonnes of CO2. The research was carried out by ICF international who are climate change consultants and McAfee, the anti-virus company.
Looking amongst all those spam mails for the ones that you actually want and deleting the unwanted mail is said to use up 80% of the energy.
The user of an average business creates 131kgs of CO2 every year. According to this new report, 22% of this total is down to spam.
ICF state that using a spam filter can bring down spam by 75%. This would be the same as removing 2.3 million cars from the roads and while the use of spam filters helps a lot, ICF say that tackling the origins of the spam would be far better.
When McColo, a US based web host who were known to have links to spam were taken off the Internet after their Internet providers pulled the plug, spam went down by 70%.
The effects of this didn’t last long though and now McAfee say that dealing with spam should be one of the ways that brings down the amount of carbon emissions.
Richi Jennings, a spam analyst says:
The PC on our desks uses more power when they do work, so the numbers are based on the additional work they use when dealing with spam,"
"Our report was based on mail that spammers attempt to send, including ones that are blocked by an ISP at source. Symantec only measures spam that is successfully sent.
"The vast majority of spam is sent via botnets. We’ve got Conficker building a fantastic network and you can bet your bottom dollar that it will wind up being used to send spam.
"There is speculation that the botnet Conficker is building up is owned and run by the owners of another active botnet – Waledac, itself probably connected to the classic Storm botnet – and the theory is that the owners are keeping their powder dry at the moment and will activate it once Waledac goes down."