Part of the definition of spam is that it's unsolicited, in the sense of spam filtering. The more casual and loose definition includes anything unwanted and that's fine but we shouldn't extend that definition to spam filtering. If you signed up for it then unsubscribe if you don't want it.
"If you signed up for it then unsubscribe if you don't want it."
In virtually all cases where this occurs I have signed up for the mailing implicitly (by buying something from a company and thus establishing a 'relationship') or accidentally (didn't notice they had conveniently pre-checked a 'spam me please' option in an installer or on a website).
And FWIW even for mails I don't want, I do try their unsubscribe link first and use that if it is just a few clicks to get me off the list. If their unsubscribe method is unreasonably complex (any more than two clicks is unreasonably complex, removing me from their database should be just as simple as adding me was), yes, I'll mark them as spam, and I believe they fully deserve it.
> I’m not sure how this works but I use Mail’s filter for my aggressive filtering and I also use Gmail’s filter for general purpose pre-filtering. It seems to me like I’m free to do whatever I want with my own filter, but maybe I’m marking mail also for Google as spam if I move it to the respective folder? I wouldn’t want to do that.
Oh, in Mail it might be different if Apple doesn't use that data to train it's default filter. Which seems unlikely.
I guess I don't know if Google does, I just assume they do because they're data junkies.
A simple solution I think would be to change the "Spam" button to instead read "I didn't sign up for this". That would be much less open to interpretation based on the user's own personl definition of "spam".
