How can emails “contribute” to carbon emissions?

368 views

After the “Let the Earth Breathe” news circulated on my social media homepage, one of the things I have read is to delete unwanted/unread/spam emails as one of the means I can contribute to the mitigation of carbon emissions.

How true is this, and why?

​

​

In: 8

5 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

In principle, any computing activity can *maybe* generate carbon emissions if the electricity used to carry it out was generated using fossil fuels. Emails are typically stored on servers, and the more emails there are to store, the more servers there have to be.

However, the carbon impact of an unread email is going to be miniscule. A cluttered inbox takes up a few gigabytes at most (Google starts charging after 15 GB). Modern servers typically run hard drives that can easily hold terabytes of memory – enough for thousands of people – stacked on top of each other. If these servers are organized smartly, most of your old emails are just sitting on a hard drive that rarely gets accessed, so only a baseline power is used to maintain it. It’s not like data storage is an energy-intensive activity all on its own.

You are viewing 1 out of 5 answers, click here to view all answers.