Yet another reason to hate spammers

You really don’t need another reason to dislike spammers, but if it helps put a dent in that extremely troublesome situation, I’m all for it.

McAfee, the security company we should all be familiar with, released some statistics today that are compellingly interesting. By generating 62 trillion junk emails last year, spammers wasted enough electricity to power 2.4 million households for a year. Enough already…environmentalists sik ‘em.

There's more: to process a single spam message means that 0.3 grams of carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere. That's like driving about three feet in your Prius. So if you do the math (you might need the folks at NASA to help), that's just overwhelming waste. Anti-spam tools are obviously improving to make life easier but 97 percent of all email (Microsoft study) is still spam.

So what to do? Earth Day is on Wednesday April 22, 2009 and people all over the world participate and want to help the environment. If you haven't already done so, get antispam software, set up junk email filters/folders, don't respond to spam messages, don't click on unknown links within emails and be careful where you register your email address. McAfee notes that by using spam filtering, it saves 135 TWh of electricity per year, the equivalent of taking 13 million cars off the road.

Beyond that you can find other ways to fight spam and spammers at http://spam.abuse.net/. Remember to ask what your web host does to combat the problem, as many have an excellent track record.