Healthy Mail

Mara
Mar 15, 2021
1 min read

Updated: Mar 23, 2022

When you think of email, you may think of those tons of paper you are trying to avoid. However, email actually constitutes a part of our carbon footprints as the energy required to support our increasingly heavy and numerous inboxes does add up.

The average email has just one-sixtieth of the footprint of a letter, according to a back-of-the-envelope comparison. While that may look like a sure fire way to reduce our carbon footprint, if you end up sending 60 times more emails than the number of letters you would have posted in one day, it makes no difference.

And what about the impact of email in our daily life? We got used to answering mail at any time of the day, even on weekends and after work, which has an effect on our routines. It is why email notifications have became a "toxic source of stress", as people feel like they must be constantly available for work.

The Healthy Mail plug-in allows you to gain control of your email account and manage your preferences in order to have a more sustainable account, for your mental health and for the planet. The plug-in is open-source and people can collaborate in making it better.