Automatically signing you up for a newsletter is lame, but I've emailed people here in the past asking for opinions on new projects - I don't consider that spam. I'm talking like 20-30 emails maybe - no scraping involved.
How do you define mass emails though? I don't think the people who are sending out a hundred emails are really a problem as far as spam is concerned. On my other account here I have my email listed, and I expect to be contacted every now and then about random HN projects, and I am. I don't consider those spam.