But, sure, say we go with your wishes and, as someone else suggested, call your spam something else than "spam" -- let's go with their suggestion and call it "trash email". Then the category -- or, now, categories -- of stuff that we want to get rid of from our inboxes become, in stead of just "spam", the more cumbersome "spam and trash email".

I'm sure you see the problem that immediately rears its ugly head: Language is lazy. "Spam and trash email" will in daily speech, inevitably, shortly become... "Spam". You may try to resist that, and as a longtime linguistic prescriptivist I extend you my sympathies... (But, psst, spoiler alert: This quixotic struggle is doomed to fail.)

But, anyway, you are of course perfectly free to keep campaigning for your cause. Only, in the name of all that is decent, be honest about it and call it for what it is: You're not defending spam, "only" trash.

Maybe after a while you'll realise why the rest of the world sees no difference in your distinction.

Your definition is based on what’s legal under the “established business relationship” exemption in the CAN-SPAM act, not any “commonly-accepted objective standard” of what spam is.

So then it wasn't originally defined as per your preferred legal wording, now was it?

> RBLs came into being in 1997, Spamhaus in 1998.

And did they coin the expression, or was the concept itself around long before that...? (A: AFAIK, at least a decade earlier.)

> You'll note precisely none of these organizations (in any country) blacklisting Amazon, or any other company, because they send marketing emails to their existing customers.

Ah. So it's not actually the legal definition that is important, but the corporate one. OK, gotcha, that is of course so much better. (Blindingly obvious: /s)

[Edit: Added missing quote marker > ]