Can deleting your (unnecessary) e-mails (help) save the planet?

Question

I had over 2 gigabytes of e-mails before I started deleting mine and I now have just 212 megabytes remaining.
I imagine all that data storage needed in huge data warehouses takes a lot of energy to run and this could drastically be reduced if everyone would delete their old, unwanted and generally unnecessary e-mails. Thus saving the planet(?).

Answer 1

Hmmm, never thought of it like that.



EDIT: Your wish is my command. I rated this 'interesting'. Your welcome.

Answer 2

The only advantage is that they won't have to buy another had drive. If everyone deleted their emails, they are not going to reduce the number of hard drives. A typical hard drive uses 9 watts of power and can easily be a Terrabyte. If they had a MAID based system then unused hard drives would be shut down till needed but in general there would be no advantage in power with just a reduction, just perhaps one in avoiding adding more drives when they add users.

Answer 3

Most email services like yahoo and gmail are required to delete emails from spam, archived and inbox compartments of your email after around a month of them not being accessed.