If emails had expiration dates and auto-deleted once they were no longer relevant, we could dramatically cut the environmental footprint of email.

Today, inboxes store decades-old messages that still consume power, cooling, storage, backups, and security resources in data centers.

Marketers don’t need their 2024 Black Friday campaigns living forever in subscribers’ inboxes. I don’t need spam from 2020 offering a “free SEO audit” still taking up space.

Giving ISPs a signal that certain emails can expire would reduce storage demand, energy use, and the need for new data centers.

At 360 billion emails a day / ~80 KB each with 45% being unsolicited, even small efficiencies scale massively.

‍Jonathan Loriaux first raised this idea through zerocarbonemail 5 years ago, and it makes even more sense today.

Email needs an expiration date.