Tech Tuesday: Zen & the Art of E-Mail
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I started off as an engineering student at the University of Vermont but ran out of money. I attended Berkshire Community College with the hopes of transferring to Purdue University, which at the time was something that BCC was promoting. But along the way, I married, had kids and put my education on hold. My last stint with formal education was at MCLA (working with the late, great Dr. Seeley) with a dual major in computer science and physics, and yet after all that, my diploma frame remains empty.
What does all this have to do with this article? Nothing really, other than to give a little background on why someone would have asked me the following question – "Does sending an e-mail use any energy?"
What I think they were really asking is, is e-mail a more green means of communication than snail mail? My first response was that although sending an e-mail does use energy, the practice is much more energy efficient than any other form of communication, especially when a message must go to more than one recipient.
This question was asked a couple months ago but I still find myself considering it over and over. I'm sure someone out there will have the definitive answer and if you think you do, let me know. I've created an e-mail address for anyone wishing to send me their thoughts – Tech_Tuesday@yahoo.com.
(As a side note to my last article, the password checker said I had created strong password – see if you can crack it. I change my passwords once a week so you'll have seven days before you need to start over again. If you do, you'll give me great material for that rant I promised about forwarding an e-mail without removing all the e-mail addresses attached to it.)
So here is my thinking on the energy of e-mail so far. While the process of sending a single e-mail uses very little energy – some from your computer, some from the computer of the person who reads it, and a little from every e-mail server that message passes through along the way - I think the overall process of e-mail is probably very inefficient, maybe even more so than sending a handwritten letter. The one caveat being that the more e-mail that is sent or the greater distance between sender and receiver, the more efficient a process I think it becomes.
While snail mail is designed to operate at set times and messages collect at each point and then are delivered to the next destination in bulk, the e-mail servers must run 24/7/365 (discounting leap years and corrections for an imperfect solar orbit) just in case someone wants to send one.
Not only do the e-mail servers consume electricity waiting for an e-mail to be sent, but the rooms that they are housed in must be temperature regulated, which adds to the total energy use of e-mail. Producing the paper for a handwritten message is energy expensive, as we've all seen with recent mill closings here, but in the end the product can and most likely is recycled and used again.
Computer recycling is getting better, but certainly is not at the same level of paper; recycling the toxic components of a computer is very energy intensive. And what of the computers of both the sender and the receiver – are they left powered up in case an e-mail might arrive? Are they powered up just to check e-mail?
Certainly one could make the case that although all these computers are constantly running, yours and mine included, they are off doing other processing while waiting for the next chain e-mail to arrive and therefore the overall process of sending an e-mail is an efficient one.
Next time you are at your computer, right click on the taskbar and select the task manager, then click on the processes tab and sort the columns by CPU (click on the column header twice to sort it descending). Leave this window open while you work and see how busy your CPU really is – it may surprise you. Sorry Apple users, I'm PC person and haven't a clue how to do this on a Mac.
Now, maybe if MCLA will ever answer my e-mail, I'll take that one class I have left, fill that diploma frame and finally be able to put this question to rest.
C.J. Vadnais is president of the Southern Vermont Broadband Cooperative in Stamford, Vt. His opinions are his own.
