Whilst incontestably more environmentally friendly that sending out direct marketing, marketing emails still come with a carbon cost attached to them, that can range from 4g for a plain text email, all the way up to 50g for an image heavy HTML email.
At Kulea, we take care of this for you.
We support the Woodland Trust with their tree planting initiative to ensure that the more emails we send, the more trees get planted, resulting in net negative carbon output. In fact, our entire server infrastructure is run from sustainable energy sources, thanks to our amazing hosting partners over at Krystal.
But it’s still not good enough!
We could all work to make emails more energy efficient.
That’s why we’re delighted to lend our weight to the Email Expiration Initiative.
Email expiration dates are one of those ideas that are so blindingly obvious, that with hindsight, you can’t help but wonder why they weren’t implemented from the get go.
You see, the cost of an email doesn’t just come from sending it. Your email needs to be stored in your inbox, and unless you pro-actively go in and delete it, it will sit there for all time, consuming server space and energy.
Now, in some circumstances, this can be useful. Legal agreements, sales receipts, personal emails and photos from loved ones – these all need to be kept somewhere safe and accessible.
But…
- …time limited promotional offer emails?
- … corporate newsletters?
- … event invitations?
All of these, and a million more could quite happily be deleted a couple of weeks after being sent, and literally, not one single person would notice.
And that, in essence is what the Email initiative is looking to achieve. With a consolidated effort from all parties within the email industry, Kulea included, we can push through changes that make email a more efficient and environmentally friendly force for good.
The inclusion of an email expiration date field in email headers would give the likes of Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook all they need to action the deletion of an email after a defined period of time. To learn more about how this process would work, check out the IETF draft here.
We hope you agree it’s a fine initiative, so to show your support, or roll up your sleeves with their call for assistance visit https://www.zerocarbon.email/over-70-supporters-for-email-expiration-dates/.
