> As I can find no reference to this in the guidelines, I guess this unofficial statement is the best we will get. Not a good policy - it's non-standard, and encourages the wrong kind of behaviour, but in the case of HN I will concede the point.

This is actually the same problem in another setting: the downvote has a kind of meaning, and you disagree with it; if you don't use the downvote in the way that everyone else does, your data damages the results for everyone else.

> You seem to imagine that "spam" is purely a legal definition because there exists an act of congress that seeks to limit it.

No, in fact, I maintain that the CAN-SPAM act does not define "spam" (in fact, I believe it explicitly said it would refuse to define "spam"), and that thereby failure to address the rules of that law (which is how this thread was born) also does not define spam. You thereby cannot claim that things related to that law (or even your personal stretching of that law) define "spammy behavior".

> Do I, or any regular mail user, care that the law allows menus? No, make us jump through hoops and we get mad. Or "gleefully vindictive", if you're feeling fragile.

If you really don't want to receive their mail, you should add them to your kill file. Hell: if you didn't want to receive their mail in the first place, maybe you shouldn't have signed up for it ;P. (Remember: the laws on this matter don't apply to people who are contacting you out of the blue with no prior business relationship. If someone is doing that, they they are outside of the scope of this entire conversation, and in fact are probably "spam" no matter how their unsubscribe links are implemented.)

> Gmail has great filters for example, and very rarely do most power users need to trawl through their spam folder for mis-filed messages. For most users, spammy behaviour by "legitimate" senders is much more pressing.

Gmail only has great filters until enough people like you ruin their data set by including things that are not spam into the list of things that are spam.

> For most users, spammy behaviour by "legitimate" senders is much more pressing.

No. This seems to be the position of a rather small minority of people who get really really angry on public forums about how e-mail is implemented. The majority of people you see talk about spam and the problems of spam claim that the issue is that if their e-mail address becomes at all public (such as on a mailing list, where you should expect it to be public), they suddenly start receiving large quantities of e-mail from random senders or even pretending to be their friends, neither of which can be stopped with a kill file (the correct solution if you personally just hate one specific company).

> If people really love your content, one-click unsubscribe is not going to keep them from it. If you put obstacles in the way of unsubscription, if you make it easier for them to mark you as spam (or filter you out, whatever), they will do so.

I don't send e-mail to anyone except for password resets, so you have shifted the argument. I am claiming that as a receiver of mail, I don't want people like you screwing with the spam filter to make totally legitimate mail, mail that even includes unsubscribe links that are in perfect compliance with the laws that many people argued over having, mail that I asked for and wanted to receive and would be sad that I don't, accidentally end up not being sent to me because I forwarded it to my friend Pat, and he accidentally (or purposely) clicked the unsubscribe link: that is a security issue, and should be addressed as one.