Coming up on Hands on Tech, let's take a look at a few things we can do to lower our carbon footprint.

Stay tuned.

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Hello and welcome to Hands on Tech.

Today, I, Micah Sargent, am answering a tech question that I thought was rather interesting. This question comes in from Stephen, who has written the following. Back when I worked in IT full-time, about 10 years ago, it was common to see in the signature of emails people reminding each other to think of the environment before printing this email.

It became widespread and used to slightly annoy me, so I once changed the signature of my emails

to say, please remove all attachments and content and recycle this email after use as a bit of a joke.

However, I was using a little bit of logic and that I figured that if the email already existed,

then you're saving space on the server by reusing or replying to an existing email rather than creating a new one.

This was all before carbon footprints were really a thing, and the email was on an on-premise server at the time.

I had talked to the email admin at the time and still

was never sure if I had a point or not. Anyhow, this is still stuck in my mind all these years,

and with more talk about the carbon footprint of data centers, it got me thinking again about

the cost savings of reusing emails, and if I had really gone barking mad or if there's anything

in it. This might be a bit too

niche to answer in the current format of the show, but it could be expanded into a deeper

look at carbon-saving techniques in the online world. Most all know about energy-saving modes

on their devices and so-called greener credentials of hardware. But are there other less-known

techniques to reduce your online carbon

footprint that are so simple? Then there's what is the cost of an email, asking ALAXA a question

or using an AI tool? Is there a way to be smarter and reduce your carbon footprint but still

be productive? So, Steven, I love this question. So I thought I'd do a little bit of research to try to figure out what is the carbon footprint

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