How green are Google's services like gmail?

Several articles have gone around this year trying to guesstimate the cost of a web search using Google. Of course the question should be focusing on the cost of running the Internet, the cost of each web site, etc. In this case 'the cost' must be including not just the money to pay for machines and bandwidth and data centers but the environmental cost. The carbon footprint as well as the impact of mining the metals and other stuff that go into building the machines. It costs a lot of resources to build the Internet, and those resource costs can and are contributing to the environmental problems.

A recent blog (Gmail Actually Stands for Green(er) Mail) tries and largely fails to adequately make the case that gmail is greener than other forms of email. They cite a study that over half of some random set of people reading some specific random blog prefer to manage their email via an online service (like gmail) rather than on their own machine. It's hardly a good measure of a trustworthy survey result that it is based on the readership of a single blog. That is, the survey result should not be taken as a comprehensive indication of any kind of truth. Do a majority of all Internet users prefer an online email service?

In any case the 'green web' observation here is that using a web application like gmail uses more resources to read email than would an IMAP based email client.

In a way it doesn't matter how good Google is at greening their data center resource impact. Their very act of pushing us towards cloud services causes a greater increase in network traffic and infrastructure requirements.

If nothing else Google is having to buy more servers to host the gmail infrastructure. Those servers would not exist if Google weren't running gmail. On the other hand the servers at various internet service providers would be handling that email traffic, instead, and who knows how good a job they'd do in greening their infrastructure.

This revolves around the difference between Google hosting gmail and an internet service provider hosting an IMAP service. It requires more internet traffic to host the gmail service, hence the internet backbone has to have larger capacity to handle the gmail service.

On the other hand if Google is greener enough than the internet service providers, the actual impact will be less.

Maybe. It's rather fuzzy isn't it?