GreenMail: Reducing Email Service’s Carbon Emission with Minimum Cost

Internet services contribute a large fraction of worldwide carbon emission nowadays, in a context of increasing number of companies tending to provide and more and more developers use Internet services. Noticeably, a trend is those service providers are trying to reduce their carbon emissions by utilizing on-site or off-site renewable energy in their datacenters in order to attract more customers. With such efforts have been paid, there are still some users who are aggressively calling for even cleaner Internet services. For example, over 500,000 Facebook users petitioned the social networking site to use renewable energy to power its datacenter [1]. However, it seems impossible for such demand to be satisfied merely from the inside of those production datacenters, considering the transition cost and stability. Outside the existing Internet services, on the other hand, may easily set up a proxy service to attract those renewable-energy-sensitive users, by 1) using carbon neutral or even over-offsetting cloud instances to bridge the end user and traditional Internet services; and 2) estimating and offsetting the carbon emissions from the traditional Internet services. In our paper, we proposed GreenMail, which is a general IMAP proxy caching system that connects email users and traditional email services. GreenMail runs on green web hosts [2] to cache users’ emails on green cloud instances. Besides, it offsets the carbon emitted by traditional backend email services. With GreenMail, users could set a carbon emission constraint and use traditionalemail service without breaking any code modification of user side and email server side.It is also worth to mention that the basic framework of GreenMail is not specific to email service. Choosing email as our focal point is because routing, storing, and serving email alone causes more than 1M tons of carbon emission each year, even though email is less than 1% of Internet traffic [5]. Besides, generalizing the framework to some general content delivery system is what we expect in the future.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science and Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

The Ohio State University

Year dc:date

2013

Author dc:creator

• Li, Chen

Contributors dc:contributor

• Stewart, Christopher

• Computer Engineering
• Computer Science
• IMAP Proxy
• Green Energy: Renewable Energy
• Cache System

Statement dc:rights

• unrestricted
• This thesis or dissertation is protected by copyright: all rights reserved. It may not be copied or redistributed beyond the terms of applicable copyright laws.

Language dc:language

English

Repository record dc:identifier

http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1365606957

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:etd.ohiolink.edu:osu1365606957