Stupid Research Watch: Spam Has a Carbon Footprint? Pshaw!!

In what has to be the most laughable e-mail-related studies in history, Internet security firm McAfee last week published a report claiming that spam is a major contributor to greenhouse gasses.

Warning: Rough language ahead.

According to McAfee—which, henceforth, will be referred to here as Our Research Ideas Come Straight out of Our Asses—annual spam energy use worldwide totals 33 billion kilowatt-hours.

“That’s equivalent to the electricity used in 2.4 million homes in the United States, with the same GHG emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars using two billion United States gallons of gasoline,” Our Research Ideas Come out of Our Asses said in its report.

Also according to Our Research Ideas Come Straight out of Our Asses, much of the energy use associated with spam comes from people deleting spam and searching for legitimate e-mail.

What, does dealing with spam make people fart? Are they serious with this?

Apparently, they are.

And apparently, the research itself didn’t quite come straight out of their asses. The study was conducted by ICF International, which will now be referred to here as Let’s Make Shit Up and Call it a Study.

Let’s Make Shit Up and Call it a Study’s research never addresses what energy people use to deal with spam that they wouldn’t be using otherwise.

And what piece of spam research would complete without an outlandish spam-volume claim?

According to Our Research Ideas Come out of Our Asses, it takes a user an average of three seconds to view and delete a spam message.

And in an article in the Wall Street Journal—which, unbelievably, covered this story straight faced—an executive from Our Research Ideas Come out of Our Asses claimed spam accounts for up to a third of work and personal inboxes.

Whose inboxes are these people studying? I’ve said it here before. I’ll say it again: Get a Gmail account. Google is great at determining which messages should be delivered into the inbox and which ones should go into the spam folder.

By my experience, Yahoo isn’t quite as good, but it’s not bad, nonetheless.

Our Research Ideas Come Straight out of Our Asses is the same firm that last year got 50 people to volunteer to surf the Web, sign up for a bunch of things and turn off their spam filters. And guess what. They got spammed.

Oh, and in that same study, Our Research Ideas Come Straight out of Our Asses also discovered that a lot of spam is linked to cybercrime.

Stunning.

That Our Research Ideas Come Straight out of Our Asses releases garbage like this is bad enough. But even worse are the news outlets that report it seriously. Besides the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, IDG News Service, ComputerWeekly.com, eWeek Europe and PC World News and many others all covered this spam-as-global-warmer nonsense without so much as a snicker.

Is it any wonder that so many people think journalists are for the most part a mindless herd of barnyard idiots?