Deleting emails in spam and trash can help the climate

Hyderabad: When it comes to making a lifestyle change to save our planet, we always think of the hardest things to do and end up doing nothing. Thinking of hard things can make us feel small and defeated even before we start something. Climate warriors feel that taking small steps towards change can help in […]

Hyderabad: When it comes to making a lifestyle change to save our planet, we always think of the hardest things to do and end up doing nothing. Thinking of hard things can make us feel small and defeated even before we start something. Climate warriors feel that taking small steps towards change can help in the longer run. Did you know that freeing up space on cloud storage can be a small step towards building a sustainable future?

The emails in your spam and trash folder hold up a lot of space in multiple servers stored in big data centres which consume large amounts of electricity. According to a social media post by eco-warrior Aakash Ranison, between October 2020 and September 2021, the global daily spam volume reached its highest point in July 2021, with almost 283 billion spam emails from a total of 336.41 billion sent emails.

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62 trillion spam emails were sent back in 2008, so can you imagine the numbers in 2022? On average, a spam email causes emissions equivalent to 0.3g of CO2. 33 billion kWh per annum is used globally by spam emails i.e., equivalent to the electricity used in 2.4 million homes. If all the email users deleted at least 10 emails every day, we could free up 30,00,000 GBs.

So, delete all the unwanted emails from your inbox and empty your spam and trash folder now and make it a regular habit. Unsubscribe to the newsletters you are not interested in. Help the climate in the smallest way possible.