Nuke Spam and Save $3.6 Billion in Energy

McAfee fuels the mobs' bonfire, placing greater pressure on lawmakers to do something about those annoying emails.

A new study from software developer McAfee this week could put new pressure on lawmakers to do something about the spam problem.

It turns out that unwanted e-mail messages are not only annoying; the writing, routing and deleting of spam uses about 33 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year. That equates to the electricity used by 2.1 million U.S. homes.

So that makes spam a $3.6 billion energy hog.

In fact, McAfee was full of fun facts about the detriment of spam. The 6.2 trillion spam messages sent globally produced the equivalent emissions of 3.1 million vehicles burning 2 billion gallons of gas.

And being a developer of anti-virus software, McAfee was kind enough to point out that spam filtering prevented the use of 135 billion kWh.

- Brewskie