If you were looking for yet another reason to hate the spammers that pollute your e-mail inbox, you’re in luck. It turns out that spam is really bad for the environment.

Computer security company McAfee Inc. (best known for their antivirus software) has just released what the company is calling the "Carbon Footprint of E-mail Spam Report."  The report examines the detrimental effect that spam has on the environment and the conclusions are actually quite shocking.

At this point, most of you are probably thinking, “isn’t spam electronic and, thus, waste-free?” It’s true that spam requires no paper and creates no physical waste. However, it does waste electricity. Apparently, it wastes a lot of electricity.

In the report, McAfee estimates that the energy wasted by all the junk e-mail that was sent in 2008 (over 60 trillion spam messages) was enough to power nearly 2.5 million American homes for an entire year. That’s a lot of electricity. To put it in other terms, each spam e-mail generates about 0.3 grams of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, which is the equivalent of driving a few feet in your car.

Most of the energy that’s wasted is a result of viewing, deleting and scrolling past spam e-mails. While these activities only account for a few seconds each day for most of us, that time adds up. McAfee estimates that nearly 100 billion hours are wasted each year by spam.

So, the next time you open your inbox to find messages with subjects like “BOOST UR SEXVAL POWER WITH C1AL1$,” you have yet another reason to get mad.