Nobody tell this guy that they used to be printed on actual paper and physically mailed, he seems like he’s having a hard enough time as it is.
Spam emails are riding on the rails of an existing infrastructure that provides incredible value. I agree that they are wasteful, but damn this is some melodramatic doodoo.
https://www.techbusinessnews.com.au/does-email-spam-affect-the-enviroment/
Its estimated that spam consumes more than 33 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity every year, the same amount as 2.4 million homes. It also produces the same amount of green house gas(GHG) emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars.
4g of CO2 per email? I find that hard to believe. Probably overestimating emissions like some media did with Netflix.
https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-carbon-footprint-of-streaming-video-fact-checking-the-headlines
I think you’d be surprised how much dedicated infrastructure and labor exists for A) spam, and B) anti-spam.
I used to manage email servers as part of my job, and >95% of traffic was spam. At the time, that seemed to be typical, judging from my discussions with others in the industry. Today I hear the number is closer to 50%, but I suspect that’s because a lot of anti-spam measures are done further upstream (e.g. outgoing mail servers) so a lot of spam never makes it to its target server to begin with. And I guess spamming resources have moved somewhat to other protocols.
We spent thousands of dollars to get dedicated hardware to filter spam, along with a fat support contract for the spam-blocking software. Multiply that by the number of businesses that use email. (Of course, nowadays most businesses use cloud email from either Google or Microsoft, so it’s much more efficient as far as anti-spam goes.)
At another job, I set it all up myself using open-source tools because we couldn’t afford a fancy commercial solution. This reduced upfront cost but greatly increased the hours of labor I had to spend working on it.
Here’s a study from 2012 estimating the cost of spam was about $20 billion per year in America alone: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.26.3.87
We estimate that American firms and consumers experience costs of almost $20 billion annually due to spam. Our figure is more conservative than the $50 billion figure often cited by other authors, and we also note that the figure would be much higher if it were not for private investment in anti-spam technology by firms, which we detail further on. Based on the work of crafty computer scientists who have infiltrated and monitored spammers’ activity, we estimate that spammers and spam-advertised merchants collect gross worldwide revenues on the order of $200 million per year. Thus, the “externality ratio” of external costs to internal benefits for spam is around 100:1.
Ok now do actual physical junk mail
I really have no need to ever check my regular mailbox. It’s all junk mail. Everything else like bills are all online (even things like property taxes)
Physical mailboxes are good for junk mail and for court/legal paperwork. Neither of which I ever want to see.
I think about this for all the work and resources that go into surveillance and psych manipulation on social media platforms.
Unfathomable amounts of hours and resources have been cumulatively spent by society to research the technologies and train the knowledge workers who make all of this possible and for what? Instead of having those smart, educated people do LITERALLY ANYTHING that would contribute to society, they’re spending their time and expertise to make people sadder and angrier to sell ads for things people don’t need. It doesn’t even need to be something “important” like curing diseases or fixing climate change for them to be more valuable than what they’re doing now. As long as it’s not actively making things worse. That’s the bar we’re setting at the moment. And then yeah I guess on top of that it’s probably wasting a lot of material and energy resources too.
What value does flooding my spam folder with Swedish spam create for anybody? I just hit delete sometimes.
And while we’re at it what’s with Google Drive Swedish spam?