Can the spam

ON JUNE 12th a judge in California referred a lawsuit against Sanford Wallace, who styles himself “the king of spam”, to the United States Attorney's office for possible criminal proceedings. Mr Wallace is being pursued by Facebook, a social network, for allegedly gaining fraudulent access to Facebook accounts and using them to distribute unsolicited messages. He has already been ordered to pay $230m to MySpace, another social network, for using that company's site to promote pornography and gambling. Mr Wallace filed for bankruptcy on June 11th.

Such behaviour is not only antisocial, it is also bad for the environment. According to a report from an environmental consultancy, ICF International, commissioned by McAfee, a computer-security company, some 62 trillion unsolicited e-mails were sent in 2008, using 33 terawatt hours of electricity. That is equivalent to the energy consumed by 1.5m American homes or 3.1m cars over a year. If generated by coal-fired power stations it would release 17m tonnes of carbon dioxide, some 0.2% of global emissions of this greenhouse gas.