The environmental cost of keeping mail and files online keeps rising

I've a thousand or so Buy.com and Newegg ad emails and who knows how many topic reply and other useless notification emails.

I will probably never spend the time to find and delete them.

> “If I want to actually do something with my data, I have to warm it up and move it through the data center,” he said. And when you empty the email trash, you probably aren’t actually erasing the data. Multiple copies of even decade-old emails are stored on servers around the world...

I guess it's just as well, anyway.

The title:

> The environmental cost of keeping mail and files online keeps rising

Makes me think I'm going to read about all the terrible stuff that goes into storing so much useless data. How many semiconductors are manufactured to store my and everyone else's never-to-be-read-again emails? How many HDD arrays, tape backup, enclosures, racks, packaging and transportation of all that stuff, cement, steel, heavy construction equipment, data centers, fiber cables, exchange bandwidth, employee labor and management planning, waste disposal, negative return mineral extraction and environmentally toxic precious metal recovery that can kill workers and drains into rivers, lakes and the ocean.

From the third paragraph, on:

> The problem is that all those messages require energy to preserve them.

Nope. The article is only about climate change, the only type of environmental issue humanity is to be concerned with.

My ignorant 20th-century man corrected title:

"The climate change cost of keeping mail and files online keeps rising."