[teakettle42]

> Mails landing in your inbox that you'd rather not get, but which are not unsolicited (say, by you signing up for an account and confirming your address),

This itself is a redefinition of “spam” to exclude the types of spam businesses want to send.

There’s a two-part test I use to define “spam”, which I think is aligned with both the historic definition, and how most users perceive it:

1) An e-mail is a marketing e-mail if, on the balance, the e-mail primarily benefits the sender, not the recipient.

2) A marketing e-mail is spam if the user did not explicitly opt-in to receiving them.