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The Mother Jones article from last Monday entitled “Are Email Attachments Bad for the Environment?” is certainly getting a reaction. The article is still circulating the twitosphere, even one week later.

The story features some interesting quotes from Matthew Yeager, identified as a data storage expert from the UK, including:

“sending an email attachment of 4.7 megabytes creates as much greenhouse gas as boiling your tea kettle 17.5 times.”

You have to hand it to the English – they can reduce the complexity of the Internet and the global debate on greenhouse gases down to the topic of brewing a cup of tea.

While Yeager didn’t go into the details of his tea kettle calculation – many commenters have, including Anonymous, who provided the following:

According to PBS Roughscience, a standard kitchen kettle takes about 2000 Watts of electrical power. Thus, 17.5 × 2 kW = 35 kW. But that’s power (P), not energy (E = P×T) over time period T. If it takes about 10 mins to boil a kettle then, 2 kW / 6 = 0.33 kWh per boil.

If a typical British kitchen kettle is assumed to hold 1.5 liters, that’s about 6.34 US coffee cups, according to Google convert. According to General Electric, brewing 3 pots of coffee (6 cups) requires 1 kWh of energy. So, 1 brew (or 1 kettle boil) takes about 0.33 kWh, which seems consistent.

The controversy seems to arise from whether the claimed 35kW per email is a reasonable number or not.  As one IT manager commented

“Now I know our server room is warm, but the damn thing would melt if it was using that much energy.”

While nobody disputes that email attachments take up storage, and that redundancy, backups, and sharing of email attachments explodes the storage requirements, what does seem to be up for debate is the scale of the energy consumption.  As of today, Mr Yeager hasn’t come forward to explain or revise his estimate, which might explain why this story keeps circulating.

I think I need to sit down with a cuppa to think this one through.

The first iPad 3G showed up at Accellion today, cause for celebration.   As the hour-old owner of the iPad in question, I opened up a Skype video chat to show it off to Acellionites far and wide.  But there was also cause for concern:  would people be able to use it to send Accellion links?  I quickly volunteered myself as the beta tester for this dicey mission.

It began easily enough.  Click the Safari icon in the lower left corner to open a web page on the iPad, and type in the URL of your favorite Accellion web interface.  From there, I logged in using my network credentials (ah, the magic of LDAP integration!).   Seeing the Send File page, I wondered:  who would be the lucky recipient?  Yes, it was the same victim of my Skype chat, our fearless Director of Channel Strategy, Sunita.Reddy@accellion.com.

All was going well until I got to the Select A File button, which did not want to seem to engage for me.  Was it pilot error, or did we have our very first iPad compatibility issue?  Not wanting to trigger a worldwide development alert, I decided instead to use the Request a File button on the Send File page, to allow Sunita to send a file back to me.  She confirmed receipt of my invitation, and we seemed back on track.

Good news followed, as I was able to bring up my Accellion GoogleMail account on the iPad, and saw a new email with a file in my inbox.  A click or two later, and Sunita’s latest presentation on a new Accellion product (sorry, top secret) was quickly downloading to the iPad.

Extending Accellion to new platforms has been a recurring theme during my five years at the company.  Stay tuned…..

David Cain
Vice President, Worldwide Channel Sales
Accellion, Inc.