[growt]

Working for an email marketing company you will aknowledge that something like "email marketing" exists. So there is a way to do this right. Maybe I haven't read TFA closely enough, but I didn't see him mentioning scraping or buying the emails. Maybe that was implied by the number IDK. Initially I just replied to a comment mentioning 4% signup rate and categorizing that as spam, while I thought that rate looks actually quite good. It kind of escalated from there :)

[yellowapple]

Email marketing can also include newsletters and emails to existing customers (in fact, the latter is the vast majority of the "email marketing" I receive).

Of the two above, the latter is probably the spammiest, and might technically count as "spam" since they're unsolicited, but they're generally (in my opinion) targeted sufficiently well enough to be acceptable/tolerable. In excess, though, they can quickly cross that line into being unquestionably spam.

[NoGravitas]

I generally consider "emails to existing customers" to be [bacn](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-21830739), in that they're neither ham nor spam.