More unintended consequences of technology. Not only unintended but very much unwanted. The San Francisco Chronicle [reports](http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/04/14/financial/f210641D12.DTL&type=health) on the environmental impact of Internet spam.
> There are plenty of reasons to hate spammers. Add this to the list: They’re environmentally unfriendly.
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> A report being released Wednesday by security company McAfee Inc. finds that spammers are a scourge to your inbox and the environment, generating an astounding 62 trillion junk e-mails in 2008 that wasted enough electricity to power 2.4 million U.S. homes for a year.
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> The “Carbon Footprint of E-mail Spam Report” estimated the computational power needed to process spam — from criminals tapping their armies of infected PCs to send it, Internet providers transmitting it, and end users viewing and deleting it.