How bad is e-mail for the environment?

Washington

A STORY started making the rounds last week about French energy regulators asking companies to cut back on e-mail in order to save energy. It sounds like a satirical piece - it did, in fact, end up in Reddit's "Not the Onion" subsection - but the suggestion really did come from the French regulator, RTE.

But as the French warning indicated, there is a whole infrastructure behind every message - which includes not only the electricity you use but also the energy that it takes to store and transmit that information through data centres.