# What is the economic and environmental impact of spam email?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-economic-and-environmental-impact-of-spam-email/816699>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [June 25, 2018, 1:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-economic-and-environmental-impact-of-spam-email/816699 "2018-06-25T13:20:19Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![mandala](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mandala/32/95_2.png) [@mandala](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mandala)\
**Post date:** [June 25, 2018, 1:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-economic-and-environmental-impact-of-spam-email/816699/1 "2018-06-25T13:20:19Z")

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There’s got to be some impact to that tsunami of spam that gets sent out every hour of every day. There’s the lost productivity dealing with it. But is there a real, measurable economic or environmental impact to it? Would global warming slow down a bit if we went a few weeks with no spam at all?

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**Author:** ![dzeiger](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/46a35a/32.png) [@dzeiger](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dzeiger)\
**Post date:** [June 25, 2018, 4:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-economic-and-environmental-impact-of-spam-email/816699/2 "2018-06-25T16:20:40Z")

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I doubt it would slow down global warming much outside of “every little bit helps,” but yes, there is impact. If half of the email coming in is spam (and it’s probably more than that), than there has to be twice the number of mail servers you would otherwise need to handle the load/storage. Plus further processing power to run spam filters, bigger routers to handle the bandwidth, etc.

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**Author:** ![Siam\_Sam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d78d45/32.png) [@Siam\_Sam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Siam_Sam)\
**Post date:** [June 27, 2018, 6:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-economic-and-environmental-impact-of-spam-email/816699/3 "2018-06-27T06:05:13Z")

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I received some e-mail coupons for some Spam. But then, this _is_ Hawaii.