The UK government saying "delete old emails" to save water. 🤦♂️
Most emails average about 50k of storage even for someone who gets a lot of attachments, and will have exactly zero effect on data center consumption.
"Don't use cryptocurrency" and "don't use generative AI" would of course be thousands of times more effective.
I think this is just setting up an future excuse when a freedom of information request is put forth for some ministerial emails, so they can just turn around and say it was "lost" as part of this "save water" directive. 🙄
Or banning high-frequency trading.
Make sure you recycle that plastic, too!
In fact, millions of people signing on to hunt for old emails online, when they've probably been downloaded to your laptop, when sitting in a file consumes nothing, wastes MORE energy.
This is ugly misdirection. And dumb.
Did I say dumb?
Just laying the groundwork to be able to blame us for keeping a few old emails instead of where the blame really should be directed. Classic.
@MichaelTBacon The power use of storage at scale is roughly 1 W/TB, see for instance page 14 the presentation on storage for science: https://indico.cern.ch/event/1338689/contributions/6010862/
So that would put the storage of the average persons entire archive of old emails (say at most 10 GB) at about 1 kWh per decade?
Welcome! The CHEP conference series addresses the computing, networking and software issues for the world’s leading data‐intensive science experiments that currently analyse hundreds of petabytes of data using worldwide computing resources. The CHEP conference location rotates between the Americas, Asia and Europe, and is typically held eighteen months apart. The CHEP 2024 conference will be hosted by the AGH University of Kraków, Institute of Nuclear Physics Polish Academy of Sciences and...
Being generous, many people may have even close to 100 GB of email.
At the same time, your estimate it looks like comes from spinning disks. Most email storage from large vendors is going to be on hierarchical storage so old stuff is going to be either extra compressed or on tape. And according to that presentation, the tape is .13W/TB.
So it *might* be 4-5 kWh/decade?
@MichaelTBacon I did check my personal archive, and I've gotten a lot of emails in the last 25 years, it only added up to 12GB though. Of course, now that I think of it, anything other than the last couple of years is compressed.
We could just round that up to "less than 1 kWh/year" in either case. Or roughly equivalent to reducing the thermostat setting by 0.001 degrees for heating, if I got the numbers right.
@MichaelTBacon the water and energy savings come from having less data for AI and surveillance systems to process
Storage is cheap, spyware is resource wasting
:)
But our whole economy is now based on cryptocurrency scams and generative AI bullcrap!
It reminds me of the DotCom bubble, ... shortly before it imploded.
@geoffl How many of your emails contain an attachment?
How many are just text or HTML?
@MichaelTBacon Loads have PDFs, docx, increasing large photos, etc, attached. Others are HTML with company logos and product marketing shots embedded. I get very few that are just text.
This morning one from a government department has a 350kB picture. Another from my bank has a 600kB image and with all the other html and graphics totals 1.2MB. At least ebay make an effort to minimise picture size but a saved search emails still contains multiple images 20-40kB each plus logos and graphics.
@geoffl I'm aware of how attachments work, thanks,.
I used to be in the business of running an email system for a very large organization. The average message size for most normal organization is around 50-60k, with the vast majority of messages being under 10k but the average being pulled up by attachments.
@MichaelTBacon You asked. Almost none of the email I recieve is anywhere near that small. I haven't recieved a text only email for several weeks.
Since my last reply I've recieved another email. This time with 3 x ~850kB images and 4 others ~60kB embedded.
I'm a very light user of email and I have 45GB of it across gmail and proton.
@hedders @MichaelTBacon Indeed. All my personal emails aren’t. Work emails are because of legal requirements (although does anyone trust Microsoft to keep them in the UK?)
Yet again the political class has no understanding at all about technology. See also; Online Safety Act.
@MichaelTBacon Ah but Google and Microsoft are using the water when training their AIs on your old e-mails.
That's about the only way I can justify it.
There are so many better ways to pay outside of the credit card system than crypto. Any of the payment apps are superior.
Besides, the blockchain never forgets. If you want to hide transactions, it's a pretty rotten choice.
@MichaelTBacon the payment apps are region dependent and subject to government overreach and lobbying just as Visa and MasterCard are. PayPal alone gave us two of the worst tech oligarchs in the world (Musk and Thiel)
Blockchain is a ledger of all transactions, yes, but coins like Monero are specifically designed for privacy and can be obfuscated well.
@MichaelTBacon No, "Get off facebook" etc would be far more effective but that isn't #UKLabour's goal. Look at the effects of what they do to see their intent.
It is fascism, authoritarianism, genocide - all in the cause of capitalism or wealth inequality.
mails don't generate a shit load of money out of thin air, so fuck'em
just keep using that sweet sweet #AI
@MichaelTBacon I dunno, hey. Long email threads containing lots of HTML and graphical signatures on every message in the thread can run into many many megabytes, and every time you reply, the new message is bigger than the last, because nobody actually deletes older messages in the thread.
HTML email in general is a bugbear of mine, and HTML signatures with embedded graphics is an even bigger one. They make an email which would otherwise be less than a kilobyte take up 600kb or more.
On the other hand, I take your point. It's a drop in the ocean (no pun intended) if your aim is to save water. :-)
@GrahamDowns A lot of graphical signatures are done with A HREF tags though and aren't stored as part of the email.
Around 10 years ago the average message size on a very large email instance I help run was around 50-60k because so many emails are very small (<10k). Yes, attachments bump it up, but a ton of messages are pretty tiny.
@MichaelTBacon To be honest, I would still consider 10k too large to justify the substance of most messages (attachments excepted, of course). I would say 2k should be more than enough for a particularly long one, with anything over 5k being exceedingly rare.
The problem is, well over 50% of the "text" that goes into an email these days is html which is never actually seen by a user. It's a waste.
And regarding those graphical signatures, the email itself might contain just an <img> and <href> tag (both of which take up unnecessary space, as mentioned above), the image itself is still a couple hundred k, and once you've downloaded it, it's embedded in the message in your email client for offline viewing, so that email, which should really have been no more than 2k (maybe even 500 bytes, if it's just a "Hey, how are you?" type of thing) is now consuming 600k on your hard drive.
Why? Why would you do such a thing?
HTML emails and embedded images are a huge part of why 14.4kbps Internet is no longer fast enough. And if it weren't for those, we'd be using a lot less energy.
But, getting back to the original thread, just to re-iterate, I completely take your point about e-mail being hardly worth mentioning in the face of AI.
@MichaelTBacon Case in point: here's a screenshot of the emails in my Thunderbird inbox day, showing the "Size" comment.
Nothing under 90k, but based on the content in each one, most of those emails could've been a few hundred bytes at most.
@MichaelTBacon One of them in particular, not visible in that screenshot, literally contains the text,
"Hi <name>,
Looks good, thanks!
Cheers,
<name>"
Plus an HTML signature.
It's part of a long thread, to be sure, but that particular email is... 449 KB. 😲
A forestry business in Canada told the utility it would be using vast amounts of electricity because it was expanding into crypto to print money.
The utility said no.
Government said no.
Courts agreed. No.
So say we all.
@MichaelTBacon @steely_glint gah nerd-swiped here.
50k per email
I’ve got 10,000 emails sitting there.
Uk population 60million
= 30,000 TB ish
Let’s say cloud energy use is 64kWh per TB per year (figures vary wildly, possibly pessimistic)
= 1.92 TWh
It’s not nothing - data at rest is going to be a fair chunk of the overall data centre energy (and by extension water) budget.
(I *hope* I’ve got all my zeroes in the right places)
Another reply to this had some clear data on power usage per stored TB. Given that almost all email at this point will be on some kind of hierarchical storage with cold data being highly compressed and/or on tape, at most it's about .5W/TB.
For your 30 PB figure, that's generating capacity of around 15 kW needed, or less than one smallish wind turbine.
Rune Langhoff
Michael Bacon
Christopher 
FREE🇵🇸PALESTINE, Says @Sine
feliz
bit101
Galbinus Caeli
John
Kevin Russell
honk if you want to honk 
RealGene ☣️
Jax UK
Steve Loughran
Manda
Estarriol, Terrorist Dragon
bjb 
maswan
der.hans
Harry Blauberg
groff 🇺🇦
Hedders
Marcus The Board Gamer
Colm Ó Donnchadha
avatastic 
MarjorieR
Michael T Babcock
Possumantha
Rara
Jonathan
Cj
happyborg
Retro Relics
𝗣𝗠𝗝 ⚫
Graham Downs
3 Muskrats in a trenchcoat
Androcat
sortius 
Sam Easterby-Smith
Malcontent Creator 
Tim Panton