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> I understand that there will be server farms handling my email in the real world, but those server farms are handling billions of other emails, and live and d
by xg15 2y ago
> I understand that there will be server farms handling my email in the real world, but those server farms are handling billions of other emails, and live and die on power costs, so I don't really think that my email is sucking down power there?
Of course it does? The handful of CPU cycles the server spends on it draws power, so will the tiny amount of additional heat generated that has to be moved by the HVAC, repeat that for all the MTAs, proxies, gateways, routers, switches, cell base stations, etc that are involved in the exchange and I can see how the overall consumed power might add up.
Of course in reality, it's hard to impossible to trace the total power consumption and CO2 emissions of a single transaction, so I suppose, you'd rather measure in aggregate - e.g. some data center that does nothing but email routing processes x million emails and consumes y kWh per day, so assume a power draw of y/(x*1 mio) kWh per email for that data center -, then multiply by the average number of hops per email, add routing on the lower layers to that, etc etc, and I see how you could feasibly arrive at sure a value.
- dghlsakjg 2y agoSure, I'm not arguing that it doesn't use power, I'm arguing that it is ridiculous to believe that sending an email with an attachment is somehow a very intensive prospect (or that sending an email can really be measured in grams of CO2). I can do it in my house, using extremely inneficient machines for 1/1000 the carbon emisions being claimed. To put it into context, 50g of carbon is more than all of the carbon that will be emitted by a disposable lighter if you burn it until the butane is gone. That is an incredible amount of energy to claim that sending an email costs. Especially when you consider that in the same breath they claim that sending an email without an attached e-ticket uses 1/250th the energy. I just refuse to believe that sending a QR code in a PDF is somehow polluting more than burning all of the butane in a light. of course the real answer is that power isn't free, and emitting carbon costs power. If sending an email cost that much power, each email would cost more than $.01 to send in energy costs. Given the number of emails I can arbitrarily send and receive I wouldn't expect email sending to be so cheap, and I would expect large attachments to be extra.