IT and consumer computer users are the main contributors to carbon emissions and there is no doubt that email has a large share of responsibility on this issue that affects both the ecology and energy. Does Gmail helps or not?

Every time you send and receive email – even when limited to e-mail storage on a server – is using energy. Several people, however, argue that if you want to grow, it is best to use Gmail as a mail system.

Bob Gourley, the OpenWeb Developer’s Journal, claims that Gmail is email in the world greener. His argument is simple. Google makes a significant ecological work in their centers of mass storage of data, using techniques such as the evaporation of water for cooling and, in general, deals with the rationalization of its electricity infrastructure. “Google takes even the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) of its servers to reduce energy requirements”.- expresses Gourley.

The result of all this is extremely efficient in regard to energy and data centers green. The move, widely accepted, the use of data center energy is energy that is calculated taking into account the total energy used by a data center and dividing by the energy use of information technology at the center data.

Google has taken other steps to reduce the carbon footprint of their data centers, such as the use of renewable energy in some of them or recycle their water cooling system, for example.

Is it or is not Gmail e-mail more environmentally friendly and willing to use renewable energy?