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Spam ‘produces 17m tons of CO2′

pimg src="http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/45670000/jpg/_45670043_spamgraph.jpg" align="left" width="226" height="170" alt="Spam emission breakdown" border="0" vspace="4" hspace="4"/pp class="first"bA study into spam has blamed it for the production of more than 33bn kilowatt-hours of energy every year, enough to power more than 2.4m homes./bpThe quot;Carbon Footprint of e-mail Spam Reportquot; estimated that 62 trillion spam emails are sent globally every year. /ppThis amounted to emissions of more than 17 million tons of CO2, the research by climate consultants a href="http://www.icfi.com/"ICF International/a and anti-virus firm a href="http://www.mcafee.com/"McAfee/a found. /ppSearching for legitimate e-mails and deleting spam used some 80% of energy. /ppThe study found that the average business user generates 131kg of CO2 every year, of which 22% is related to spam. /ppbUnwanted traffic/b/ppICF say that spam filtering would reduce unwanted spam by 75%, the equivalent to taking 2.3 million cars off the road. /ppHowever, the ICF goes on to say that while spam filtering is effective in reducing energy waste, fighting it at the source is far better. /ppThe report highlights the case of McColo , a US web hosting firm that had ties to spammers. The day after it was taken offline by its two internet service providers, global spam volume fell by 70%. /ppAlthough the respite was only temporary, McAfee said the quot;day without spam amounted to talking 2.2 million cars off the roadquot; and that tackling spam should be part of the campaign to reduce carbon emissions. /ppquot;As the world faces the growing problem of climate change, this study highlights that spam has an immense financial, personal and environmental impact,quot; said McAfee's senior vice-president, Jeff Green. /ppThe Spam Report follows only a few days after Symantec's bi-annual Internet Security Threat report, which found that spam had increased by 192%, with bot networks responsible for approximately 90% of all spam e-mail./phrpThis article is from the a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk"BBC News website/a. #169; British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites./pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/bbcnewstechnologyfullfeed?a=3gNcKsCAs9s:_WSz7Irhyt8:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/bbcnewstechnologyfullfeed?i=3gNcKsCAs9s:_WSz7Irhyt8:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/bbcnewstechnologyfullfeed?a=3gNcKsCAs9s:_WSz7Irhyt8:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/bbcnewstechnologyfullfeed?i=3gNcKsCAs9s:_WSz7Irhyt8:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/bbcnewstechnologyfullfeed?a=3gNcKsCAs9s:_WSz7Irhyt8:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/bbcnewstechnologyfullfeed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~r/bbcnewstechnologyfullfeed/~4/3gNcKsCAs9s" height="1" width="1"/