I don't think your definition of spam matches the one that I understand it to mean. Spam is random email from someone you have not had contact with before firing messages to every address they can find anywhere on the web, the dark web, etc. Or if you ask not to be added to a mailing list and are added anyway. They often use fraudulent tricks to try to get the email through filters, such as fake from addresses.

Spam is not email from legitimate companies with valid contact details that have an opt out that you forgot to click when you signed up with them. That's legitimate marketing emails. You might argue they also shouldn't exist, but they are a different category.

I get plenty of the second from mailchimp (it's what they do), almost none of the first. Marking the second kind as spam, rather than clicking the unsubscribe link is dangerous because it teaches your anti-spam filter to reject messages from legitimate companies. You might find that if they need to contact you for a genuine reason e.g. a reciept for a future transaction, the message is blocked.

I disagree, I get plenty of spam from Mailchimp. Spammers seem to be able to add email addresses to Mailchimp without verification, and they just keep making new accounts/"campaigns" to re-add my email addresses.

Legitimate companies like to not provide the legally-required opt-in flow and assume consent without ever enabling or disabling a consent checkbox. That is spam too.

It's on Mailchimp to not take business from companies that abuse their system. If they get flagged as spam and their other customers have delivery issues because of that, I see that as a feature, not a bug.

* Spam is not email from legitimate companies with valid contact details that have an opt out that you forgot to click when you signed up with them. That's legitimate marketing emails. You might argue they also shouldn't exist, but they are a different category.*

No, they’re all spam. It’s just that some spam is significantly worse than others.

Edit:

this just reminded me of an interaction with a customer when I worked at a dialup ISP over 20 years ago. We would routinely get abuse reports about spam coming from our network that would turn out to be a family computer with a virus. We would disable their account until we got ahold of them, and then help them run antivirus or redirect them to a local shop to fix it.

But this one time my boss is like “Hey you wanna pretend you're the email manager? We have an actual spammer sending ads for a local business through our smtp servers”. We were all laughing at the audacity of it, they were sending thousands of the same message out, I think it was for a tackle shop.

When I called the guy to let him know why we disabled his account he immediately got angry at me, I vividly remember him saying “It’s not spam, it’s for a business!!” I explained to him that it doesn’t matter, it’s just as bad, and could get the whole company blacklisted from sending emails. Turns out his friend owned the business, and convinced him to install something that sent emails through outlook express.

The reason I got that duty is because I had no problem being confrontational back then. I remember telling him that I think he should be fined, and permanently banned from the internet. But that we’ll only let him back on if he uninstalls the thing.

He called back indignantly asking why we were allowing some other spam. I had to explain that it was from another network, and we’re trying to stop it, and that if every ISP were like us then it would barely be a problem.

I wonder if that business spams through google now.

> I don't think your definition of spam matches the one that I understand it to mean. Spam is random email from someone you have not had contact with before firing messages to every address they can find anywhere on the web, the dark web, etc. Or if you ask not to be added to a mailing list and are added anyway.

I don't get _only_ this from Mailchimp, but I definitely get quite a bit of this from Mailchimp, Sendgrid, and others. I've marked it spam, reported it to them (no response), and continued to receive the emails.

I can be kind of scatter brained and generally give the benefit of the doubt, but sometimes it's pretty clear that, e.g., I most definitely did not sign up with some accountant in a different country, in a place I've never been to, to receive reminders of tax deadlines that don't apply to me and offers of accounting services I can't use. Or if I somehow did, the signup was deceptive enough that they never received meaningful consent and I'd call it spam anyway.

(And the email they're sending this to is not some easily confused gmail address or a fat finger--it's my own name at my own domain.)

Having valid contact details or an opt out on their sign up form isn't relevant given I never signed up. It's _unsolicited_, _bulk_ email. It's spam.

> Spam is not email from legitimate companies with valid contact details that have an opt out that you forgot to click when you signed up with them. That's legitimate marketing emails. You might argue they also shouldn't exist, but they are a different category.

Yes it is. Using a dark pattern to trick me into signing up doesn't make it not spam. It's still spam.

I get plenty of Mailchimp spam from people who have bought email lists and added me to their newsletter. It’s against their ToS, and I always indicate that I did not sign up for the list when I unsubscribe. Maybe it does something.

> an opt out that you forgot to click when you signed up with them

This is the textbook legal definition of spam in any sensible jurisdiction, though.