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Market failure has been much in the news of late, but one notable breakdown has attracted little attention: spam. Some 200bn junk emails are sent daily. More than 40bn come from the US and Canada, and about 6bn from Britain. Estimates vary, but the best guess is that more than 90 per cent of all email is spam.
What causes this stupefying supply for which there is no apparent demand? The answer is simple: sending an email is free. Yet billions of junk messages take a toll in complex and haphazard spam filters, productivity losses and misuse of increasingly crowded bandwidth. Spam is used to spread viruses and sell fake or fraudulent goods. Moreover, there is an increasing risk that spam will make legitimate email a form of second-class post.
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