I would love to have some real numbers.

Emails have now days pretty large pictures and even moving things. I wonder how much companies preload mails. For example does gmail start to preload all the unread mails in the first page when i open my inbox? And if they do how much one mail needs processing power in average and how many people open their inbox everyday.

And how much of that preloading is necessary for good feeling service.

"We are grateful to the public for following the restrictions, where in place, to conserve water in these dry conditions. Simple, everyday choices – such as turning off a tap or deleting old emails – also really helps the collective effort to reduce demand and help preserve the health of our rivers and wildlife."

Sounds like a slip of the tongue. Or maybe written by AI and not checked.

Huh? That press release quotes the The Environment Agency’s Director of Water and National Drought Group chair saying "Simple, everyday choices – such as turning off a tap or deleting old emails – also really helps the collective effort to reduce demand and help preserve the health of our rivers and wildlife" and includes "Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems" in its list of ways people should save water at home.

I admit I made this post without clicking through to the actual press release or seeing more than the paywall preview of the article; for a humorous post like this, i think just the headline from a paywalled article (if it's from a reputable source) is sufficient. Now that you got me to read the actual press release, I see I was correct to assume that 404media's amusing headline was in fact accurate.

How would you suggest they report this story differently? Highlighting the ridiculous part is what makes it worthy of reporting on it in their context at all.

It’s the very last line of the page and seems so out of left field it’s hilarious… QUOTE:

HOW TO SAVE WATER AT HOME Install a rain butt to collect rainwater to use in the garden.

Fix a leaking toilet – leaky loos can waste 200-400 litres a day.

Use water from the kitchen to water your plants.

Avoid watering your lawn – brown grass will grow back healthy.

Turn off the taps when brushing teeth or shaving.

Take shorter showers.

Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.

/END QUOTE

That’s verbatim and pretty much what 404 stated. It ignores the fact that not all data centres are water cooled (with the exception of AI/compute based centres) and data storage is a fairly low demand compared to that.

EDIT: Put the relevant section in quote because people can't distinguish between what I typed and what I copied from the previous poster's link.

I’m unsure if that’s borrowed from somewhere, but I read that in Monty Python.

Datacenters don't spin down drives. Like ever. Spin up time is too much overhead when a request finally comes in.

The "savings" here is that removing data from the mail hosts in general means that less drives need to be brought online to handle new data. Less drives overall = less wattage.

The better request would be to go onto icloud and delete all those pocket pictures... or duplicate pictures that you uploaded. One picture can be dozens if not hundreds of text emails.

I run most of my own services including email... My inbox with stuff from 2006/2007 time-frame and about 150,000 emails is a mere 11.6GiB... My automatic image backup folder on Nextcloud eclipses that readily for just one month of images/videos (I have kids).