Email spam is a significant problem for both individual users and businesses. Its financial impact and, in the case of some phishing schemes, the personal pain and loss has been the subject of many research studies. But until McAfee commissioned climate-change consultant ICF International
and spam expert Richi Jennings to calculate the environmental impact of spam, spam's contribution to GHG emissions had been largely ignored.

This report looks at global energy expended to create, store, view and filter spam. ICF calculated the GHG emissions associated with this energy use, resulting primarily from the burning of fossil fuels for electricity generation.

This white paper uses the ICF analysis to make a compelling argument for stopping spam at its source as well investing in state-of-the-art spam filtering technology, which not only saves time and money but can pay off in big dividends to the planet by reducing the carbon footprint of email spam.