I'm all for being green and I take environmental reports seriously. But sometimes, you just have to look more closely at the claims being made. A recent report commissioned by security vendor McAfee claims that "annual spam energy use totals 33 billion kilowatt-hours (KWh), or 33 terawatt hours (TWh)...equivalent to the electricity used in 2.4 million homes in the United States". The same report then claims that 52 percent of the energy drain from spam "comes from end-users deleting spam and searching for legitimate email".
The takeaway the report commissioners want you to have is that spam filtering software (which McAfee happens to sell) is a green product that will save billions of kilowatt-hours of energy per year. A cool argument to be sure. The only problem is, it isn't true. Jeremy Kaplan of PC Magazine explains why the math behind the numbers just doesn't add up.
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