One of the promises of cloud computing, is that you never have to lose anything, ever. Which, sounds like a dream come true for anyone who has had hard drives die unexpectedly. It does, however, come with negative consequences.

There's a good chance that you've never really thought much about the impact of your email. The folks at HEY.com did and it's a great example of how when you don't follow what the competition does, you can come up with brilliant new ideas.

Whilst the effect of one email being stored indefinitely isn't that much or a problem, we send 306.4 billion emails a day,  and we're encouraged to store all of them, complete with attachments, for an indefinite period of time. It doesn't take a mathematics genius to realise that's cause for a considerable amount of resources being used up.

Obviously there's the cost of the memory/disks/servers, and their counterparts which provide redundancy in case of failure, and then potentially backups too. Then, besides the cost of the energy to run them, there's also the cost of the real estate space in which they reside, and the cost of running (including cooling) that space. Not to mention the energy cost of transporting/syncing that data to you in real time to wherever you are in the world.

Consider that each time someone replies to an email, the previous (and previous, and previous previous...) content is included. And now think about how many of those emails are copies, or copies of copies, or have been sent to several, dozens or even hundreds of people. Complete with several megabytes worth of attachment. It's a mess. Everything I've described so far is for normal transactional emails. Now think about the amount of ephemeral emails that only need to be read once, like newsletters. Oh, and let's add spam messages into the equation too. It's a big mess.

Thanks to their business model of simply charging for their product, HEY doesn't read or track your emails in order to build up a profile about you to sell to advertisers. That puts them in the position to launch a new idea: email recycling. Here's the link to David's post if you want to read more.

You might think that "recycling" is the wrong word, after all, the email is destroyed. But I think it's exactly the right word - because whilst the information is destroyed, the energy that was being consumed is released to do other work. Brilliant. I hope that the team will be able to monitor how many emails have been recycled, and eventually be able to quantify that in their future impact reports.

I'm creating the book and podcast series for people who want their small or medium business to make more profit and better impact. Take a look: https://sixtyminutestoimpact.xyz

I'd love to help you could become positively impactful by not playing by the rules your competition does - if that intrigues you, send me a message, let's have coffee.