Power move - carbon footprint of emails

I’ve used servers that can vomit out hundreds of thousands of emails per hour.  You’re talking pennies on the sending side.

Thanks for the reply. I understand what you’re saying… but it’s all carbon right? Googling some numbers, the carbon footprint of sending / transmitting / receiving an email plus storage for a year could be 60g of carbon. Just wondering how me powering up / down for 30 mins relates to the savings by just not running the scheme, and saving all the notification e-mails I will be getting. As you say, multiply than up by hundreds of thousands, and that’s a big carbon saving by just not doing something? Wondering about the trade off of that versus the benefits of the scheme and the overall carbon & financial costs. 

Surely you would be powering your device up/down anyway to check if you had any emails from anywhere.

So whether OVO had sent you one for Power Move or not becomes irrelevant to that aspect.

The servers storing the emails are running 24/7 anyway, so no saving there by not having PM emails stored on them.

In effect the only extra energy use that could be saved is the actual transmission of the messages.

Once you just consider that transmission, and not the other energy use that happens anyway, then it will be a lot less than the 60g carbon that you quoted above.

This question prompts another; the human implications (in terms of the employees, overheads, office and other support) of the diversification of focus of energy providers like OVO, or retailers like M&S away from the core business (selling me gas, leccy, groceries, pants, etc) into online marketing and trickery?  

I was always really impressed by both OVO and Marks for their service and product quality and value - and for the helpfulness and knowledge of their front line and call centre staff. But this faith began to waver as the Marketing and IT geeks began to seemingly take over. Now you need a degree in Computer Science and an array of technology (laptop, tablet, smartphone, passwords and log-in ID…) to interact with ‘em.
 

And the baffling complexity of the messages which clog up my inbox but fail to deliver? I’ve so far earned exactly £1.43 from many months of gimmicky-titled OVO initiatives, and when an overdesigned email from Marks (with eight brightly coloured tile-graphics guaranteeing joy) lured me into my local shop, neither the staff nor till computer could deliver the promised “10% off four bottles of wine”. 

However, let’s look on the bright side?  If all these armies of software engineers, marketeers and designers weren’t getting paid to exert power above their station and churn out this geekery, what would they be up to? Unemployed, starving and roaming the streets mugging old codgers like me?

This is my favourite reply of all time.