False positives - the huge hidden cost of spam

The cost to our businesses and the economy of spam is well documented. These irritating and repetitive unsolicited email messages are a blight on the internet. Its hard to put a dollar figure on the cost, but its certainly in the billions of dollars.

But there is another, hidden, cost which is totally overlooked. Based on our experience, this cost is much bigger than that of just receiving spam. What could possibly be more damaging than billions of annoying spam emails?

Simple, the hundreds of millions of important emails which are NOT delivered every day.

How do I get the figure of hundreds of million of lost emails every day? CNET estimates 31 billion emails are sent every day of which 38% are spam. If the remaining email hits spam filters with a false-positive rate of only 1% that results in almost 200 million emails lost every single day.