Hosting an email mailbox uses 3ml of water per year
From Mythic Beasts, the UK internet provider:
@cstross to put some numbers on it, one of our hosting VMs has ~1200 mailboxes using 1.5TB of SSD. Accounting for the CPU + RAM to allow the mail to be usable and searchable, you can get ~20 such servers on our standard 1U VM host, that uses ~250W. Approx 24k mailboxes on a server. A standard DC with adiabatic cooling would evaporate at most (likely much less) than 3500l of water per server per year or 145ml per account. We're in Telehouse South which uses 40x less water ~ 3ml/mailbox/year.
Safe to say, email is not the problem, despite recent spoofery from the UK government's PR apparatus.
Tags: email smtp hosting water climate-change mythic-beasts datacenters