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> Spam is by definition unsolicited email (often commercial in nature) from someone you never have had any sort of (business) relationship with.

Can you provide a reference to that definition?

I have checked on merriam-webster, oxfordreference.com, oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com, and wikipedia. None of them include the "from someone you never have had any sort of (business) relationship with" clause. Or even anything which could be read that way.

> Yes, it is super annoying that they automatically sign up your address for marketing

Yes, super annoying. And also spam. If I didn't ask for it it is spam. If they trick you to "agree" to it (for example by having a checkbox where checking the box means you don't want to receive emails) without you realising, that is still spam.

> there is a way to unsubscribe

Sometimes. Doesn't make it any less spammy.

> None of them include the "from someone you never have had any sort of (business) relationship with" clause.

Spam is illegal, but I'm pretty sure none of the mentioned sources make the law about what is and isn't allowed to be sent. Maybe you can find the actual definition in the laws that apply in your jurisdiction.

The laws regarding spam are not the definition of "spam". Rather, the laws describe a subset of spam that can be clearly and definitively identified as "spam". It does not include cases that are just barely within a grey area, but which any reasonable person would label as "spam".

The law follows the existing understanding of what constitutes spam, just as it does for "murder", "theft", and a myriad of other cases. The law does not define these terms, only how they will be applied within the context of the legal system.

If an email address is provided for not-marketing purposes, and is used for sending marketing emails, that’s spam.

For example, I went to a mechanic, and provided my email address as a way to contact me. I started getting marketing emails from Sirius XM, despite never having interacted with them. Therefore, marked as spam. If Sirius doesn’t want their emails to be marked as spam, they shouldn’t be sending out spam.

Edit: Or, in the case of Walgreens, their "Unsubscribe" link reported that there was no subscription at the email address to which they had just sent an email. For that one, I did give a reply to let them know of the issue, and got no response. When the next one arrived from Walgreens a week later, that was reported as spam.

Whether I have a relationship with a business or not, if they send me emails that I didn't ask for and don't want, they're unsolicited.

That's, like, the definition of "unsolicited". In the dictionary and everything.

Doesn't matter if there's an unsubscribe link either. It's still fucking spam.

When you unsubscribe, what happens?

Do they now mark your address as "still active and being read" and send it more messages because it's now more valuable?

Or will you stop getting email from them?

That's the difference between things you should be marking as spam and things that annoy you but are legal and you'll just need to press unsubscribe on (and be careful with whom you give your data to). Write to your representative if you want the law changed on what's legal.

You can also complain to the market authority if an identifiable party sends you unsolicited commercial email outside of the law. If they're not identifiable then it's never legal, and that's what you should classify as spam because spam filters are meant to catch this. A legit business can be held accountable and has an interest in remaining in business, but real spammers aren't so simple to trace down and stop so that's what these filters are meant to do.

I get plenty of junk mail in the post. The fact that it's legal doesn't stop it being junk mail. Yes, I could take the time to write to a politician to complain about junk mail, or I could just chuck it in the trash and get on with my day.

Ditto spam. Yes, some of the spam I receive might be within the law. That doesn't stop it being spam though. I could also take the time to write to a politician to try and change the law on what spam is legal and what isn't... or I could just mark it as the spam it is and get on with my day.

What kind of junk mail? Where you gave your physical address to a third party and now they're sending you crap, but they're a legit business that you can tell to stop doing that and then you stop receiving junk mail, or do you mean they got your physical address from data leaks and the sender tries to scam you into resetting your password, sell you illegitimate drugs, etc.? You're talking as though both kinds, legal and illegal spam, are the same thing.

> Yes, I could take the time to write to a politician to complain about junk mail, or I could just chuck it in the trash and get on with my day.

What you're suggesting is messing with a spam filter designed to handle illegitimate email to get confused enough to also filter out legitimate emails based on a guess as to whether or not you might want it. You're not "just chunking it in the trash and getting on with your day" but actively harming the system instead.

> What you're suggesting is messing with a spam filter designed to handle illegitimate email

No, I'm teaching my spam filter about which emails I consider spam, so it knows to automatically filter them out in future. Which is exactly what I want my spam filter to do. That's its job. That's why I installed it.

> You're [...] actively harming the system instead.

Lol.

I'd say the vast number of irrelevant commercial bullshit people get in their email harms the system more. It is spam. If I order a pair of pants from the Gap and they start sending me two or three emails a day, that is spam. If those marketing emails got marked as spam by all providers by default, the world would be better off.

Same with physical mail, which also explicitly just has an option for "bulk mail", which is even worse. If I could opt out of receiving mail from the USPS entirely, I would. (Although I consider them to be the most reliable service for sending and receiving packages.)

If I sign up for a service but don't explicitly opt in to getting their newsletter, any marketing emails I get are spam, and flagged accordingly. The whole idea that I've implicitly opted in without being asked is nonsense.

That's something to take up with your representative, because that's legal unfortunately (specifically: marketing similar products based on past purchases, and in my experience, the consumer market authority takes that definition rather broadly).

There's a second category of unwanted email where unsubscribing has as only effect that you'll get more spam because now they know that your email address is actively being read. The sender is a hacked server or a botnet, and no business is identifiable as sender. This type of illegal activity is what spam filters are designed to combat. You're not helping the designers by marking other email as spam: it muddles the data, causes legit senders trouble (like me, I don't have a newsletter but spam filters are so aggressive that personal messages sent from my server still regularly ends up in spam), and makes everyone's life harder.

> That's something to take up with your representative, because that's legal unfortunately

Or you culd report it as spam in your email client. Because legal or not, it's still spam.

I'm fairly sure that according to even the old (by internet standards) American CAN-SPAM act, if you cannot easily unsubscribe then it is illegal.

I might however have misremembered something so please if someone knows, feel free to fill in.

You're quite right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003#Unsubscri...

I think in the Netherlands (or EU?) it has to also be one-click. It can't first give you a survey or ask you to enter your data again or other hurdles. It's quite strict in that way, but then quite loose in the way that businesses are allowed to send you unsolicited commercial (e)mail if you previously purchased something and they want to market a related product to you. Win some, lose some. I can see the point, though, that you might be genuinely interested in their new fancy better improved heat camera if you previously bought a heat camera of theirs, and the message still has to have that one-click unsubscribe link. I'm willing to accept this compromise even if I am usually not interested in those offers.

What has to die is the type of spam where you have no idea who the sender is or how they got your data. That's what spam filters are designed to filter out, since you cannot filter that by normal/legal means. It's much harder to try and make a spam filter read your mind on whether email from a legitimate business is something you're interested in reading (you may or may not care for that order confirmation, newsletter that you may or may not have signed up for, etc.).

But I've learned today (from the subthread above) that having the general public make this distinction and correctly train spam filters (such as email, but presumably also on reddit and such) together is a lost cause. We'll have spam forever, yay.

> It's much harder to try and make a spam filter read your mind on whether email from a legitimate business is something you're interested in reading (you may or may not care for that order confirmation, newsletter that you may or may not have signed up for, etc.).

Hence, the "Report Spam" button.

No don’t be silly, if you use that button you’re actually breaking the whole system.

You’re just supposed to sit there and take the unsolicited non-spam from everyone around you and never touch that button ever, or dare call something that doesn’t fit one person’s ridiculously narrow definition of “spam” that.

And if you don’t like it, your inly course of action is obviously talking to your representatives to change the legal definition of spam. Anything else is breaking the system.

/s, for those wondering.

> No. Spam is by definition unsolicited email (often commercial in nature) from someone you never have had any sort of (business) relationship with.

The name "spam" comes from an old Monty Python skit about hearing the same thing over and over and getting sick of it, so this definition doesn't really respect the history of the term. The name spam started as a Usenet moniker some time after some lawyers started trying to get people to pay to enter the free green card lottery run by the US government.

This definition almost sounds like you're gesturing at "UCE" (unsolicited commercial email) which some people started trying to push as a definition for spam back in the day.

> Yes, it is super annoying that they automatically sign up your address for marketing, but there is a way to unsubscribe.

I mean, you're responding in a thread where they mentioned that's impossible to reach that page because they're banned and ignoring that people long ago found that unsubscribe was being abused to confirm (and then sell) verified emails to other spammers.

Some of us do crazy things to let us use unique emails per service, so we can find out who is selling our info.

Did you miss where the original person is unable to unsubscribe because they were banned? In this specific scenario, it is absolutely spam, otherwise known as Unsolicited Commercial E-mail (and by virtue of them being banned, these specific mails are by definition unsolicited).