Welcome to the "Email Expiration Date" initiative
26 points by lim
26 points by lim
I think this is a potentially a good idea from a UX perspective, but it's not going to make a dent on carbon figures.
Doing searches I get a figure of 25 billion 'promotional' emails sent per year in the US (I'm excluding obvious spam as I doubt they will sign up to this scheme, and most providers auto delete spam anyway).
Taking a random 'promo' email I got from an ecommerce site, it's around 100KB, but compresses down to 20KB with basic gzip.
25 billion emails * 20KB (compressed) = 500 terabytes per year for every email (assuming that 25b figure is roughly correct - if not, scale up as you see fit. It doesn't change much). Now assume each email is stored 3 times for redundancy/backup purposes, you're at 1.5PB.
This is a lot obviously, but a modern storage rack can store ~2PB and draws a couple of kW (max). Obviously there's more to it than this but it sort of shows you how efficient data storage is from a power point of view.
To put it in context, a single NVL72 rack uses 120kW.
All this effort/financial support could have been used to finance some solar PV for the grid and would have orders of magnitude more carbon impact (which would still be tiny).
This is one of those times that a fairly small effort at re-foresting some area would actually offset the generated carbon. Which makes it extra odd that wasn't the chosen solution.
I guess it won't hurt to know that an email has expired, for example when it's a one-time login code. But I can't imagine email vendors actually going and deleting emails or something. So this initiative won't actually have a real effect. Greenwashing using headers.
Greenwashing?
Yes, and a way to legitimize spam: We added a header, see how responsible we are with our "promotions"?
On the other hand, won't the header make it super easy to have the email hit the "promotions" folder instead of the main inbox? That's probably why it won't happen.
Maybe, but it would be a useful feature anyway.
I have tons of useless notification emails, expired email confirmation links, tickets, calendar invites. It would be nice to have an expiration date on them even just to lower their priority in search.
It will be greener to send a timestamp than ask an LLM to evaluate freshness of each email (which I bet all the AI bubble companies are telling their coding agents to implement right now).
I kinda agree, but sometimes these notifications are useful without expiry.
I just found a folder of 10+ year old Twitter "you have a new message" emails and they included the full body text. Looking at my bubble, 90% of those accounts do not exist anymore, or at least the tweets don't.
So yes, people have exported their stuff and I'm surely not advocating to duplicate all content in your notifications, but I think it proves as a useful counterexample - most people would probably prune that folder every year, but I had them stashed away somewhere.
Your email-related proposal will fail because:
... [x] it requires cooperation on the part of the malefactors ...
There is still some value in non-malicious senders giving their mail an expiration date.
Though I'm unsure if it should ever be used for deletion, I don't think anyone should be able to delete mail I receive.
I think this project agrees.
And the messaging solution will offer the recipients mechanics to more or less automatically delete these emails (with their consent of course).
The UI they are going for seems to be that an email client can support a "show all expired email" view, then the user can choose to mass delete or pick and choose.
I'm unsure if even that could work if senders misuse expiricy for example billing or something like that. In any case it further reduces any potential effect it could have.
If implemented, this would be used entirely by companies aiming to time-box certain communications, and never by marketers.
There has to be at least one marketer somewhere who would set expiration when sending short-lived coupons! Maybe someone who worked the till before and got annoyed by people haggling about expired coupons.
There seems to be some popularity of the idea that unneeded, stored emails are an environmental problem. I get it, it's something people can relate to. But I seriously doubt that this matters, and, as far as I can see, this page provides no numbers to back their initiative up.
"Dead storage" (aka stuff that is somewhere in the cloud, but not accessed frequently) doesn't require much energy. The bulk of energy consumption in IT is computing tasks. If you want to do something about that, talk about taming the energy consumption of LLMs or Bitcoin.
Data needs storage devices, and those need raw material. But even within the area of storage, I doubt old marketing emails matter. If one looked at stuff that takes up lots of storage space in data centers, I'm pretty sure it's video content at the top, possibly also some types of scientific data, and emails probably don't matter that much.
Transfer also has multiple ways to be expensive. And unlike Bitcoin, making sure nobody ever defaults to 4K video on a FullHD device or a 5'' smartphone might be neutral enough to the business model to get some compliance…
I find it easy to support the big picture of this idea. However, without EU level legislation (like GDPR), I feel like it'd be a very pinkie-promise type of rule.
One can't help but assume that, without concrete and enforced rules, companies would just slap generous expiration dates (think years or decades) on mail that could've been trashed a week or month later, in case customers happen to stumble upon one of their old emails and want to revisit their product.
The unfortunate reality is that any initiative to improve email without buy-in from Google and Microsoft is effectively dead in the water, and I don't really see evidence of progress on that front in the nearly 5 years this site has existed.
Especially when MSPs like Google and MS charge their business customers for their email storage usage. They're incentivising themselves to discourage their users from deleting mail.
You know the best solution to this problem? Don’t send emails to people who didn’t request it.
So, yeah, if you have any other proposal to "make spam more ethical", please follow Bill Hicks advise about marketers.
Oh, you know what ploum's doing? He's going for that anti-marketing dollar. That's a good market. He's very smart.
(Sorry. Couldn't resist.)
Your solution doesn't cover the suits deciding that opt-in discount coupons emails should use a few megabytes of graphical design per 20-kilobyte-barcode-and-caption actual coupon.
This will only be effectively used by big corporations to set a 2 week deadline on “the user saving the contract” for the service/good you just purchased. Then a few years later your lifetime license is revoked and there is no way for you to look up the original terms for a dispute 😂