Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Signatures

My workplace is tied to environment protection and such and I've been wondering now for a while now, how much resources are wasted on processing e-mail signatures? We have a policy to have all kinds of crap in the signature, about 25-30 lines... sigh, fortunately nobdy enforces it so my signature is a whopping 2 lines, but I digress.
Anyway, many thousands (millions?) of servers need to process e-mail all the time, checking for spam and filter to folders and so on. So if the body of the mail is 1-2 lines and the rest is just baggage, how much energy is now wasted just to move the useless signature around ? One e-mail may not be much, but when you think about how much e-mail is transferred all the time and going to many routers and servers. It must add up to quite a lot don't you think?

1 comment:

Adam said...

Good thought. Never considered this. I wonder if anything can be done (technically? maybe. politically/actually? probably not eh).

Also, makes me laugh even harder at the "Conserve our natural resources, think twice before you print this email!" crap on every mail you get from many large corporations.