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.
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