As per the security vendor McAfee study, "Carbon Footprint of Spam," the annoying and, at times, criminally misleading spam also has a carbon footprint! The caustic affect of spam to the environment includes considerable energy consumption and the production of carbon emissions. McAfee's momentous study was conducted in association with climate-change specialist ICF International.    

The study, which looked into the 62 trillion spam e-mails sent in 2008, investigated their anti-environment by computing electrical output and carbon emissions.

The results revealed that at least 33 billion kilowatt-hours of annual energy output - as much as used in 2.4 million homes - is made use of while transmitting, processing and filtering spam. In addition, spam brought about greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to those of 3.1 million passenger cars running on 2 billion gallons of gasoline!

The McAfee report, which took into account the spam-linked global energy output across 11 countries, found that the average greenhouse gas emission from one spam message equaled .3 grams of CO2; the figures being later multiplied by the annual volume of spam.

Commenting on the relevance of the recent study, Dave Marcus, McAfee's security research and communications manager, said: "It's getting people to think about spam in an entirely different way. This is just a new way of letting people see there is a natural quantifiable impact to the environment."