3…2…1… Your message has been deleted.
A heavy mental and environmental burden, the sheer amount of email and data storage adds to our already heavy carbon footprint.
With the increasing number of emails and mailboxes, reducing our carbon footprint must go beyond personal initiatives.
Badsender has realized this by initiating the Email Expiry Date project. A group effort, inviting all players in the email industry to contribute to reducing our carbon footprint.
With its values aligned with the movement, Mindbaz has added the feature for its customers.
Email expiry dates: A solution to reduce the carbon footprint of marketing communications
An essential project
On the Zerocarbon.email website, the facts are clearly stated:
“A significant share of emails become obsolete just a few days after recipients receive them.”
Take a look at your inbox(es). How many of your messages could be deleted?
- Email Marketing:
- 24 hours to take advantage of an offer
- Christmas and Black Friday email campaigns
- Promotional offers for abandoned shopping carts…
- Shopping-related emails:
- Forgot your password?
- Delivery tracking
An e-mail often weighs very little. Badsender estimates that the average email is 90kb.
Should we really delete these 90kb?
In the detailed article on the email expiry project, Jonathan Loriaux attempts to calculate the weight of French emails. Relying on data from the DMA (formerly SNCD), he estimates a total of 68,040 6TB disks for the year 2020, which is a low estimate.
6 TB
The importance of deleting emails is now obvious.
But how do you properly and efficiently delete emails?
It’s an ongoing debate.
Agnès Pannier Runnacher, French Minister for Energy Transition, commented on the impact of digital technology on BFM TV. She said we should avoid sending “a funny email to a friend with an attachment, which consumes a lot of energy”.
Others, on the other hand, stress the importance of deleting emails:
Oh hell @franceinfo your green advice to delete emails is out the window!!!!! It’s been shown time and time again that cleaning up your e-mails uses MORE energy than leaving them alone. When you have an audience, you should use it more wisely 😭😭😭😭
— Guillaume Champeau (@gchampeau) September 8, 2022
On Bonpote.com, Tristan Nitot, digital entrepreneur and author of the Octet Vert podcast, looks at the environmental impact of email on three different levels:
- The user device: smartphone, computer, connected TV, printer, gaming device, connected object…
- The network: from Internet routers at home to 5G antennas
- Data centers: to host services and data.
Its detailed analysis highlights one main thing: deleting emails can be useful, but joint initiatives are needed.
Email Expiry Date, the useful and eco-friendly collaborative initiative for your emails
“To reduce the carbon footprint of these emails, they should be deleted, and deleted quickly once received. And to avoid putting this responsibility on the recipient, why shouldn’t it be up to the senders to set a date when their emails become obsolete? That’s the whole point of expiry dates.”
- Basically, it’s senders who define when a message becomes obsolete.
- Email routers (like Mindbaz) transmit the information to webmails like Gmail, Orange or Yahoo.
- Webmails allow recipients to enable the auto-delete feature.
The beginnings of the Email Expiry Date initiative
The project begins with a brainstorming session led by work groups. The aim was to prepare the technical part of the project. Benjamin Billon and John Levine produced an initial draft for the IETF, an institute that develops Internet standards. Benjamin and John wanted to reuse a header called Expires. This header is already found in RFCs.
The aim is to standardize email expiry dates so that they can be implemented worldwide.
As an e-mail router, Mindbaz is aware of the stakes involved and is taking its responsibilities seriously.
From now on, the Mindbaz platform will enable customers to enable the “Email expiry date” feature and set a minimum duration of 15 days.
“Getting the email marketing industry to move towards the implementation of email expiration dates is a long-term project.
So every time a new emailing solution integrates the functionality, it’s a small victory and several million emails become time-sensitive.
We have the real challenge of proving that this project is viable, useful and continues, even if there are no financial goals behind it.
It is up to a whole community, a whole sector of activity to take responsibility and make the system evolve to make it more environmentally friendly and resilient.
Jonathan Loriaux, CEO and founder of badsender
Mindbaz customers, enable the expiry date option for your email campaigns
With Mindbaz, you can set an expiry date when you create or change email configurations.
In the first “Settings” step, under “Email expiry date“, you can set a number of days after which your email will be automatically deleted. (Minimum 15 days)
For example, if you set the expiry date to 45 days and send your campaign on January 1, the email will be automatically deleted on February 16.
Don’t forget to tell your contacts that you are joining the Zero Carbon Email initiative too!
Limitations of the Email Expiry Date Project
No MSP has implemented Expiry date handling
Unfortunately, today’s Mailbox Service Providers (Orange, Gmail, Yahoo…) still don’t read the email date.
This means that even if Mindbaz customers enable the feature for their campaigns, the emails will not be deleted.
So why add an Expiry date?
With an increasing number of routers and companies involved in the Email Expiry Date initiative, we’re sending a strong message to MSPs:
As soon as they join the project, all the configurations will be ready on the router side, and the companies will be ready too.
“This is a powerful project for all companies that share the same values as Badsender and Mindbaz. Let’s take control of our environmental impact to better identify what we can improve.
Every company, router and email player who joins the initiative increases our visibility.”
Pierre-Yves Dubreucq, co-founder of Mindbaz
Project partners can also communicate with their audience to show how they can make progress, and to showcase their own commitment.
Massive adoption is needed to have an impact.
A tech company that reduces its environmental impact
The Email Expiry Date project is just one of Mindbaz’s actions to manage its environmental impact.
“We continue to strive every year to reduce our carbon footprint. As an email service provider, we are aware of our impact. We are actively seeking to understand and limit it. To achieve this, we have implemented several initiatives.
All our infrastructure is located in France, and our data center is in Lille. The milder temperatures in northern France mean our infrastructure requires less cooling. Our backups are hosted in Paris.
In 2022, replacing part of our infrastructure servers helped us reduce our consumption. We’ve switched to more modern servers that use less power.”
Pierre-Yves Dubreucq, CTO and co-founder of Mindbaz